Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical Republican leader in the House, was ready to confiscate more land, but land confiscation and redistribution touched deep ideological nerves in the United States. In one sense, massive land redistribution was the basis of the American republic. The U.S. government took Indian lands, peaceably through treaties if it could and forcibly or through fraud and war when it thought necessary. The government then redistributed these ceded or conquered lands to white citizens. Southern redistribution, in essence, was about whether Southern whites could be treated as Indians
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