the outbreak of war. A determined band of Radical Republicans in the Congress, including such figures as Senators Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and Benjamin Wade and Representatives Benjamin Butler and Henry Davis, were bent upon imposing a harsh peace on the South and claiming the fruits of victory. Although Lincoln and the Radical Republicans agreed that former Confederate office holders and senior army officers should be ineligible for office in postwar Southern state governments, Lincoln, from 1863 onwards, had used his war powers to permit new governments to be formed in Louisiana and Arkansas in which votes equal to at least ten percent of the number of voters who had voted in 1860 declared the secession illegal and their elected representatives swore an oath of allegiance to the Union. Such an approach was anathema to the Radical Republicans, who McPherson said "envisaged reconstruction as a revolution," a total removal from power of the old oligarchy and the full enfranchisement of freed slaves in the South. Lincoln favored before his death the enfranchisement of slaves who were literate and who had fought for the Union, but had not gone further than to suggest to the governor-elect of Louisiana on March 13, 1864 that those groups be granted suffrage. Not all Republicans were in favor of complete enfranchisement of freed blacks (who were not allowed to vote in most Northern states), but the Radical Republicans and their abolitionist allies demanded immediate and full political equality for all black freedmen in the South. In July 1864 Congress enacted the Wade-Davis bill, which Lincoln pocket-vetoed, which abolished slavery in all states, specified that 50 percent not 10 percent of the voters in each state requesting readmission to the Union would have to swear an oath of allegiance, required that no state officials could be elected except after a constitutional convention had been held and restricted the right to vote for...