Lincoln (95 page)

Conservative Republicans made Liberty as well as Union their war aim. Apart from insisting on the Emancipation Proclamation, they favored generous terms for the conquered South. Seward let it be known that he hoped that no conditions, beyond the emancipation of the slaves, would be imposed on the returning rebels, and his powerful friend Thurlow Weed believed that Southern planters, mostly former Whigs like himself, would recognize the impending defeat of the Confederacy and lead their states back into the Union. Montgomery Blair wanted the President to appeal to the small farmers of the South to overthrow their slaveholding leadership and return to the Union. The Postmaster General also favored the compulsory deportation and colonization of the freed blacks.

Radical Republicans sought to add Equality as a third war aim. Most called for a drastic reorganization of Southern social and economic life before the rebellious states could be readmitted. Thaddeus Stevens, the powerful head of the House Ways and Means Committee, favored treating the South as a conquered province, wholly subject to the legislative will of the Congress. In a more elaborate argument, Charles Sumner maintained that the rebellion had vacated all government in the South and the region now fell under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress, like any other national territory. It followed that slavery, which could not exist without the protection of positive law, was abolished in the entire region—not merely in the more limited areas designated in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. It was the duty of the Congress to ensure that all citizens in the South, regardless of race, were guaranteed the equal protection of the law. Moreover, Sumner argued, “as a restraint upon the lawless vindictiveness and inhumanity of the Rebel States,” Southern lands should be “divided among patriot soldiers, poor whites, and freedmen.”

These differences over reconstruction had been simmering for months, but the division among Republicans became public in October, when Sumner articulated his plan in an unsigned article, “Our Domestic Relations,” published in the influential
Atlantic Monthly.
Blair, irritated by Sumner’s arguments and further angered because the Radical congressional candidate, Henry Winter Davis, was threatening the Blair family’s hegemony in Maryland, countered in a public address at Rockville, Maryland, on October 3. “The revolutionary schemes of the ultra abolitionists,” he charged, led to the eradication of the constitutional rights of the states and promoted the “amalgamation” of the black and white races. The best policy of reconstruction was to entrust government in the rebellious states to loyal men and then restore each Southern state to “its place in the councils of the nation with all its attributes and rights.” To Sumner’s claim that Congress alone had power to manage reconstruction, Blair replied that the “safe and healing policy of the President” was the proper way to restore the Union.

In the fierce controversy that erupted after Blair’s speech, Lincoln stayed carefully neutral. No doubt he was aware of the speculation, reported by a Washington insider, that Blair’s address had been made “by the authority of the President as a faithful exposition of his views; or... [was] instigated by him with a view to feel the public pulse,” but he neither avowed nor repudiated the ideas of his Postmaster General. He did not join Connecticut Senator James Dixon in praise of Blair’s “words of truth and wisdom” in exposing “Sumner’s heresies,” but he did not endorse Thaddeus Stevens’s denunciation of Blair as “this apostate,” whose address was “much more infamous than any speech yet made by a Copperhead orator.”

The whole argument, Lincoln felt, was “one of mere form and little else.” He was certain that Blair, for all his insistence that the people of the Southern states must control their own destinies, would not agree to admit Jefferson Davis to a seat in Congress as a representative of Mississippi, and he was
equally confident that Sumner, once the loyal people of Southern states gained direction of their own affairs, would not exclude their representatives from Congress. Avoiding a theoretical argument over whether control of reconstruction belonged to the President or to Congress, he was confident that there could be “little difference among loyal men” over the practical issue of keeping “the rebellious populations from overwhelming and outvoting the loyal minority.”

In his sickroom the President began working on an annual message to Congress that would avoid both extreme Republican positions. In preparing it he sought the advice of his cabinet, securing statistics on the army from Stanton and suggestions from Chase about details of his reconstruction program. The first half of the message was simply a pasting together of paragraphs submitted by the several heads of departments, summarizing their work during the past twelve months and referring to their longer official reports, which were published separately.

The message showed that it had been composed under difficulty; it was, several newspapers remarked, less “Lincolnian” than his earlier messages, and certainly it missed several opportunities. The President did follow up one of the themes of his Gettysburg address in announcing that “under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life,” but he did not develop the idea of a new birth of freedom. Nor did he point to the significance of the first national day of Thanksgiving, which, at the urging of Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of
Godey’s Lady’s Book,
he had proclaimed for the last Thursday in November. And he failed to note the symbolic significance of the completion of the Capitol building, despite all the strains of war, and to make mention of the placing of Thomas Crawford’s nineteen-foot statue of Armed Liberty atop the lantern of the dome on December 2.

The President also failed to use the occasion to stress the growing importance of blacks in the Union war effort. He did point out that more than 100,000 blacks were now serving in the Union armies, but he did not praise their heroism in battle, as he had earlier done in his letter to Conkling. He did not discuss the exceptionally successful efforts of General Lorenzo Thomas, whom he and Stanton had sent into the Mississippi Valley to raise black troops. Nor did he refer to his growing friendship with the great black leader Frederick Douglass, who was very active in raising Negro troops in the North. In August, Lincoln had welcomed Douglass into the White House and, in response to Douglass’s fears that he was vacillating about the value of Negro troops, assured him, “I think it cannot be shown that when I have once taken a position, I have ever retreated from it.”

Only at the end of the message did Lincoln’s distinctive voice emerge. Announcing a proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction, the President offered “full pardon ... with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves,” to all rebels, excepting high-ranking Confederate officials, who would have to take an oath of future loyalty to the Constitution and pledge to obey acts of Congress and presidential proclamations relating to slavery.
In order to encourage the political reorganization of the Southern states, he promised to extend recognition when they reestablished governments supported by as few as one-tenth of their 1860 voters who took the oath of allegiance.

Lincoln defended his proclamation as one in which, “as is believed,... nothing is attempted beyond what is amply justified by the Constitution.” An oath, he explained, was necessary to separate the loyal from the disloyal elements in the South, and he preferred a liberal oath, “which accepts as sound whoever will make a sworn recantation of his former unsoundness.” The requirement that rebels must swear to uphold the legislation and proclamations ending slavery was necessary to prevent any attempt at reenslavement of the newly freed blacks, which would be “a cruel and an astounding breach of faith,” and he went on to pledge, “While I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation.” Recognizing that loyal Union men might disagree on the mechanisms of reconstruction, the President allowed for approaches other than his own: “Saying that reconstruction will be accepted if presented in a specified way, it is not said it will never be accepted in any other way.”

This program for reconstruction outlined in Lincoln’s December 1863 message marked a decided change in his thinking about the future of the Southern states. At the outbreak of the war, believing that secession was the work of a small, conspiratorial minority, he hoped that the Unionist majority in the South would reassert itself, throw out the traitors, and send loyal representatives and senators to Washington. The military governors he had appointed were intended simply to facilitate this process. But as the war wore on, he increasingly came to question whether loyal whites were in the majority in the seceded states. His early hope of preventing the war from degenerating “into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle” faded, and he had felt obliged to strike at the basic social and economic structure of the South by announcing the emancipation of the slaves. Now, late in 1863, he was afraid that the South might follow the very course that he had favored in the first months of the conflict. There was a real possibility that the Confederates, admitting defeat, might claim that they had never been out of the Union—a legal fiction he and his advisers had always stoutly maintained—and send back to Washington the same congressmen who had denounced the Union in 1861. Lincoln dreaded “to see... ‘the disturbing element’ so brought back into the government, as to make probable a renewal of the terrible scenes through which we are now passing.” In order to prevent this possibility, his proclamation of amnesty required much sterner tests of loyalty and an acceptance of emancipation.

Lincoln’s message to Congress may have lacked his usual literary elegance, but it was certainly not wanting in political adroitness. It contained something for everybody. The President seemed to agree with the Conservative Republican position that the war was a rebellion of individual Southerners—not
of Southern states—against their government, and he carefully refrained from discussing whether the rebellious states continued to be states in the Union or reverted to territorial status. (He dropped a passage discussing this issue from the draft of the message.) To Conservatives the message offered the assurance that reconstructed governments in the South would maintain “the name of the State, the boundary, the subdivisions, the constitution, and the general code of laws” as before the war. And, most important, Lincoln gave some hope to extreme Conservatives and War Democrats who doubted the legality of the Emancipation Proclamation by pledging to uphold it only “so long and so far as not modified or declared void by decision of the Supreme Court.”

But there was more in the message for Radical Republicans. They were cheered by Lincoln’s assurance that Southerners must accept emancipation as an essential condition for reconstruction and by his promise that slaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation would never be restored to owners. The requirement that all citizens in the rebellious states must take the loyalty oath before participating in the government erased a distinction between loyal and disloyal Southerners that Radicals had long questioned; all white Southerners, at least for a time, would occupy a legal status lower than that of the citizens of the loyal states. In addition, by saying that the governments in the rebellious states had been “subverted,” Lincoln implied that they had ceased to be fully equal states in a constitutional sense. With its careful balancing of Radical and Conservative proposals, the message was, as the Democratic
New York World
sourly remarked, “a creditable specimen of political dexterity,” which “trims with marvelous adroitness between the two factions of the Republican party.”

So dexterous was it that when it was read to Congress on December 9 reactions were, as John Hay reported, “something wonderful.” Among the Radicals, Sumner was beaming, Zachariah Chandler, who had recently warned the President that he must take a bold stand, was delighted, and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts said the President had “struck another great blow” for freedom. At the other extreme, Conservative Senator Dixon and War Democrat Reverdy Johnson pronounced the message “highly satisfactory.” With the lions lying down with the lambs, it really seemed to Hay “as if the millennium had come.”

In the country at large, reactions were equally favorable. Of course, a few antiwar Democratic newspapers condemned it. It was, declared the
New York Journal of Commerce,
a “ukase from the chambers of an autocrat”; the
Chicago Times
suggested that the severity of the terms for Lincoln’s proposed amnesty demonstrated that the President was either “insane with fanaticism, or a traitor who glories in his country’s shame.” But most other public voices enthusiastically endorsed the President’s plan. Greeley’s Radical
New York Tribune
declared that no presidential message since George Washington’s had “given such general satisfaction,” while the anti-Radical
New York Herald
praised the President for repudiating “the abolition plan
of Senator Sumner.” Sumner himself spoke of Lincoln’s message “with great gratification,” because it satisfied “his idea of proper reconstruction without insisting on the adoption of his peculiar theories.” On the other hand, the Blairs praised it because it supported the Conservative position and annihilated “Sumners and Chase’s territorial project.” From all over the country the President received letters of praise. Friends were “in jubilee over the Message,” reported a New Yorker; it was
“Magnificent,”
wrote a Washington resident; “Posterity will regard you as ... the restorer of
honor,
peace and prosperity to our land,” promised another correspondent; while from Ohio came the report that everybody agreed that Lincoln had “said the right word at the right time.”