Why do you think that president lincoln took a lenient position toward the states t?

Why do you think that president lincoln took a lenient position toward the states that had seceded?|||He sought saving the Union and reunification of the same over the revenge that many in his own Republican Party wanted. He realized, correctly, that an attempt to exact vengance would only lead to divisiveness among the states and people. Unfortunately, his attempts were cut short and the attempts at revenge led to exactly the divisiveness that made reunion impossible. Our own country is proof that such led to racial hatred (on all sides) and made the South desperately poor for more than another century.|||He wanted to put the country back together. He thought that would even be the best way to end slavery even if it took longer to do that. He actually had a plan to slowly buy out slaveholders but it would require a united states to do it, and to be fair if the south had seceeded there probably would have been slavery for decades more, if not another century.|||He had the wisdom to see that hate benefits nobody. And there was enough hate left over from the war without codifying it in "punishment" laws etc. Of course his untimely death removed him as an ameliorating factor, and the political results of the hate-sowing Reconstruction are still alive today, sad to say.