In my own words… A picture of military rule in the South

By By McRae Limerick / guest columnist
Feb. 22, 2004
Not many people have studied the Civil War-era military rule in the South and how absolute it was, nor how it came about.
The South was doomed after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who had already planned to return the 10 states of the Union after a brief period of reconstruction. When Vice President Andrew Johnson took office the Congress more or less ignored him when he began to carry out Lincoln's plan.
The Congress passed a military bill that Johnson vetoed, and was quickly overridden. His statement of the bill was as follows: