Lincoln's blueprint for Reconstruction included the Ten-Percent Plan,which specified that a southern state could be readmitted into the Union once 10 percent of its voters (from the voter rolls for the election of 1860) swore an oath of allegiance to the Union. On December 8, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln offers his conciliatory plan for reunification of theUnited States with his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. By this point in the Civil War, it was clear that Lincoln needed to make some preliminary plans for postwar reconstruction.
In late 1863, Lincoln announced a formal plan for reconstruction:
1. A general amnesty would be granted to all who would take an oath of loyalty to the United States and pledge to obey all federal laws pertaining to slavery
2. High Confederate officials and military leaders were to be temporarily excluded from the process
3. When one-tenth of the number of voters who had participated in the 1860 election
had taken the oath within a particular state, then that state could launch a new government and elect representatives to Congress.
