Representative Thaddeus Stevens, of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, speaking to an audience in Lancaster, explains his concept of land reform in the confederate States: all agricultural land should be seized and redistributed into forty-acre family plots to each of the six million freedmen living in the former Confederacy. The remaining land would be auctioned off to pay the Union war debt, and establish a trust fund to pay veterans of the Army of the united States, who fought in the War of Federal Aggression. “[W]e hold it to be the duty of government to inflict condign punishment on the rebel belligerents, and so weaken their hands that they can never again endanger the Union.”
[restored 4/23/2022]
Subsequent Events:
Authority:
Article I of Amendment
ccc-2point0.com/constitution-for-the-united-states
References:
“Speech of the Honorable Thaddeus Stevens, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, September 6, 1865,” A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era, four volumes, Thomas C. Mackey, ed., (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 2013), 2:138.
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