Never Call Retreat (44 page)
Certain people would not be allowed to take this oath— officials of the Confederate government; colonels and generals in the Confederate army, and naval officers with or above the rank of lieutenant; men who had left United States judicial posts, seats in Congress or commissions in the army and navy in order to join the Confederacy; and any persons who treated white or colored prisoners "otherwise than lawfully as prisoners of war." All others could take the oath, and when ten percent of a state's electorate had done so, any state government they set up would be recognized in Washington and would come under the Constitutional provision guaranteeing to each state a republican form of government and protection against invasion or domestic violence. As Mr. Lincoln had told General Banks, there would be some leeway in regard to emancipation, or at least in regard to the speed with which emancipation was made effective: "Any provision which may be adopted by such State government in relation to the freed people of such State, which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for their education and which may yet be consistent, as a temporary arrangement, with their present condition as a laboring, landless and homeless class, will not be objected to by the National Executive."
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On the Republican side there was general approval. John Hay wrote (perhaps overstating things a little) that he had never seen such an effect produced by a public document, and said that "men acted as if the millenium had come." Here, it seemed, was the final death sentence for slavery, and slavery's bitter enemies could not for the moment hear anything else. Radicals like Zach Chandler and Henry Wilson were among those made jubilant. Owen Lovejoy exulted that "I shall live to see slavery ended in America," and although Senator Sumner showed displeasure while the message was being read, flapping books and papers about on his desk and ostentatiously not listening to the reading, he called at the White House to offer his congratulations.
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As everyone anticipated, the Democrats were much less happy, and their case was promptly stated on the floor of the House by Sunset Cox, who drew attention to an oddity. The Emancipation Proclamation had been based (inadequately, in Mr. Cox's opinion) on the President's war powers; this reconstruction plan, which logically was a derivative of that proclamation, was even less adequately based on his power to pardon, and Cox spoke bitterly of the President "assuming to pardon crime without conviction, and revivify dead States which are indestructible." Of the oath itself he was contemptuous: "As the Emancipation Proclamation . . . can never be reconciled with the normal control of the states over their domestic institutions, so all oaths to sustain the same are oaths to subvert the old governments, Federal and State. The oath required both of loyal and disloyal men in the South is an oath of infidelity to the very genius of our federative system, for it is an oath to aid anarchy, and out of anarchy create a new nation."
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Yet the Democrats in Congress could do little more than conduct sniping fire at long-range, and build up a record for the next presidential election. Earlier, Fernando Wood of New York had moved that the President be requested to name three commissioners to open negotiations with the authorities at Richmond so that "this bloody, destructive and inhuman war shall cease and the Union be restored on terms of equity, fraternity, and equality under the Constitution." The House tabled this resolution, 98 to 59; whereupon Joseph Edgerton of Indiana moved to censure the administration, denouncing as "among the gravest of crimes" the use of armed force to induce a state to modify its position on slavery, and contrasting the Emancipation Proclamation with Mr. Lincoln's earlier disclaimer of any intent to interfere with slavery. This motion also was tabled, 90 to 66, and the two actions meant little except that the House contained about sixty men who would support extreme pro-slavery and antiwar positions.
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For the time being the President could ignore the Democrats. The real fight was going to be with the radical Republicans, who soon found that they liked his proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction much less than they had supposed. They felt that it built up the presidency at the expense of Congress, which was bad; much worse, they considered it dangerously soft on secession. Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont proclaimed the need to protect the government from "the keeping of men who avow their enmity to its existence," and this expressed the radical viewpoint. Detesting the doctrine of states' rights, they sought to destroy it by insisting that secession destroyed the states that attempted it. As fervently as Jefferson Davis himself, they argued that an impassable gulf existed; they simply went on to say that the seceding states had fallen into it and were lost forever, and they considered Mr. Lincoln's argument that the states were indestructible no better than a restatement of the position taken by Sunset Cox.
The Democrats detected a logical flaw in their argument, and W. S. Holman of Indiana submitted a resolution that the radicals' position "ought to be rebuked and condemned as manifestly unjust . . . tending to prolong the war and to confirm the treasonable theory of secession," but the resolution was quietly tabled. Eventually, implacable Thaddeus Stevens raised questions. If the seceding states were still in the Union, he inquired, where were their representatives on the floor of Congress? "Every one of the United States is entitled to have members here and Senators in the other branch. Where are these evidences of existing states? They are at Richmond, where the Congress of the Union does not sit. ... It is said that the Constitution does not allow them to go out of the Union. That is true, and in going out they committed a crime for which we are now punishing them with fire and sword. What are we making war upon them for? For seceding, for going out of the Union against law."
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What the radicals wanted to do became clear, after the first of the new year, when Congressman Henry Winter Davis of Maryland presented a bill—sponsored in the Senate by Ben Wade of Ohio, and known to history as the Wade-Davis bill—offering a new plan for reconstruction.
Davis was a bitter-ender: a border state man who was a flaming Unionist and anti-slavery man. In 1859 he had voted for a Republican for Speaker of the House, which led the Maryland legislature to assert that he had misrepresented his state and had forfeited its confidence; he retorted that the legislators ought to take that message back to their masters, the people, for he would reply only to the people. He was slim, pale, with a tangled mop of black hair, and a biographer put the case mildly by remarking that "he seldom permitted the opinions of friends to influence his own resolutions." Now he was trying to set forth the terms on which beaten states might be brought back into the Union: First, the President would name a provisional governor for each Confederate state as soon as military resistance in that state had been suppressed. That governor would then enroll all white male citizens of voting age and require each one to take the oath to support the Constitution of the United States. If those taking the oath amounted to a majority of all those enrolled, they would be invited to elect delegates to a convention to re-establish a state government; but no one could either be a delegate or vote in this election unless he took an additional, "ironclad" oath that he had never held office under the Confederacy or voluntarily
borne arms against the Union. The convention in turn was obliged to amend the state constitution so as to abolish slavery, outlaw Confederate war debts and disfranchise all those who held important civil or military office under the Confederacy. The new constitution had to be approved by the voters, with the franchise again limited to those who took the ironclad oath. Then, if the Federal Congress approved, the President could announce that this state was duly back in the Union—after which it could elect Senators and Congressmen as of old.
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The contrast between this plan and the President's plan was striking. Instead of ten percent the Wade-Davis plan demanded an outright majority, which was likely to be unattainable since so much of the male population would be disfranchised. It offered no amnesty at all, and left the future of the secessionists entirely up to Washington, with the secessionists barred from the capitol while Washington made up its mind. About all the two plans had in common was that both demanded the end of slavery and the outlawing of Confederate war debts.
Mr. Lincoln had stretched the doctrine of presidential war powers and pardoning powers to its extreme limit: Congressman Davis was doing the same with the constitutional provision guaranteeing to each state a republican form of government. "That monster of political wrong which is called secession," said Davis, was simply a usurpation of power. This usurpation had brought about "the erection of governments which do not recognize the Constitution of the United States, which the Constitution does not recognize, and therefore not republican governments of the states in rebellion. . . . We are engaged in suppressing a military usurpation of the authority of the state government. When that shall have been accomplished there will be no form of state authority in existence which Congress can recognize. Our success will be the overthrow of
all
semblance of government in the Rebel states. The government of the United States is then, in fact, the
only
government existing in those states, and it is there charged to guarantee them republican governments."
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This logic was sound enough, but it was the logic of revolution, not of ordinary politics; applied to a question which was basically simple but which in this third winter of the war was taking on some extraordinary convolutions.
Ben Wade stated the question, for the Senate: "The Union is to be preserved; but upon what principle will you permit these people to come back into the Union?"
The 38th Congress was being given its choice of three principles. The conservative Democrats offered one: nothing really had changed, and These People would come back willingly once Washington stopped insisting on change. The President offered another: there was enormous change, present and still to come, but These People could and must be brought to accept it because it could not endure unless they did. Now the radicals presented the third: the enormous change would be imposed whether These People liked it or not. As Wade put it: "Majorities must rule, and until majorities can be found loyal and trustworthy for state government they must be governed by a stronger hand."
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Three principles: two of them implying the acceptance of revolution.
Mr. Lincoln is usually pictured as occupying a middle role between opposing extremes in this situation, but actually he was not. He was at one of the extremes himself, and he disagreed with the radicals only on the method by which the change was to come. He and Wade and Davis agreed on the essentials: the Union must be restored and the slave must be freed. This was what made the revolution—not the details of the restoration but the consequences of the freedom. Abolition of slavery was not a point at which anyone could stop. It was just a momentous beginning.
The President was perfectly clear about this. It struck him that whether certain states were technically in or out of the Union was "a merely metaphysical question and one unnecessary to be forced into discussion."
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The real problem involved the next step. Was the Negro to get complete civil and political equality when slavery died? Did freedom logically carry with it the right to vote? Must amnesty for the owner be accompanied by suffrage for the man who had been owned?
This involved the most fundamental question of all, and the case was odd. There was only one way to give a negative answer: say No, once and for all, and be done with it. But there were many ways to say Yes, and one or another of them was bound to follow a simple refusal to say No the first time the question came up. Qualifying clauses that might accompany the affirmative meant nothing. Unless the idea was immediately rejected it would finally be accepted, carrying its own imperatives.
To say now that the Negro should get the vote as well as freedom was to get out on the very front line of the radical position, and Mr. Lincoln was not yet prepared to go that far.
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But even to admit that some Negroes ought to vote now was to agree that all ought to vote sometime; and although the President this spring was feeling his way carefully, letting his mind make itself up as he had done on emancipation itself, he had already refused to say No. On March 13 he wrote, most cautiously, to Michael Hahn, his new ten percent governor of Louisiana:
"You are about to have a convention which, among other things, will probably define the elective franchise. I barely suggest for your private consideration whether some of the colored people may not be let in—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom. But this is only a suggestion, not to the public but to you alone."
He was considering the question, partly on a basis of high principle and partly as a matter of practical politics. He was not entirely a free agent. The current set in motion by the war was now and then irresistible, and it was at about this time that Mr. Lincoln wrote candidly: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events had got into a condition no man had planned or foreseen; the most the President could say now was "Whither it is tending seems plain," but there was no certainty anywhere.
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Yet the drift of things could be seen. The President had put emancipated Negroes into the army—100,000 of them, he told the Congress, with at least half in combat assignments —and most diverse effects came of it. The army got soldiers, of course, and at Port Hudson and Battery Wagner it found them useful under fire. The administration, possibly to its surprise, got a political dividend also; by putting the freedmen into the army it kept them out of the labor force, relieved pressure on the labor market in the North, and reduced an irritant that had been largely responsible for the New York draft riots. (Democratic Congressman Henry Stebbins of New York pointed this out in an irascible what-can-we-do-about-it letter to Party Statesman Barlow.)
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But if the use of black regiments was helping both the army and the administration, it was also doing something, the extent of it not wholly predictable, to the Negro himself. A Massachusetts officer in one of the new colored regiments in Louisiana tried to explain what he saw happening, in a letter to his mother: