Secessionist best served the ends of the radicalism which sought to reduce
the South to a conquered province, and as such to reconstruct it by hostile
legislation supported wherever needed by force.

Andrew Johnson very well understood that a great majority of the men who
were arrayed on the Southern side had taken the field against their better
judgment through pressure of circumstance. They were Union men who had
opposed secession and clung to the old order. Not merely in the Border
States did this class rule but in the Gulf States it held a respectable
minority until the shot fired upon Sumter drew the call for troops from
Lincoln. The Secession leaders, who had staked their all upon the hazard,
knew that to save their movement from collapse it was necessary that blood
be sprinkled in the faces of the people. Hence the message from Charleston:

_With cannon, mortar and petard
We tender you our Beauregard_--

with the response from Washington precipitating the conflict of theories
into a combat of arms for which neither party was prepared.

The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men had to choose between the
North and the South, between their convictions and predilections on one
side and expatriation on the other side--resistance to invasion, not
secession, the issue. But four years later, when in 1865 all that they had
believed and feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required no drastic
measures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts of Congress
had already reconstructed them. Lincoln with a forecast of this had shaped
his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man, understood it even
better than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of Lincoln he proceeded not
very skillfully to build upon it.