Lincoln (114 page)

The November elections were principally responsible for the change. It was one thing for Republican congressmen to break with the head of their own party when he appeared to be a failure, whose bid for reelection was doomed to disgraceful defeat. It was quite another to defy a President recently reelected by a huge majority with a clear popular mandate.

Republicans also found it easier to go along with the President’s wishes on reconstruction because circumstances had changed since the previous summer. While the Congress was debating the proposed Thirteenth Amendment and Ashley’s reconstruction bill, it was also moving, with the President’s blessing, to create the new Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, intended to supervise the transition from slavery to freedom in the South. This Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which gave the federal authorities guardianship over the recently emancipated slaves in order to protect them from exploitation by their former owners, made it easier for Republican congressmen to accept even imperfect reconstruction governments in the South, since they would be shorn of much of their power.

The adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment provided another incentive for Republicans to recognize the reconstruction regimes Lincoln had established. Before that amendment could go into effect, it had to be ratified by twenty-seven of the thirty-six states. Illinois, as Lincoln proudly reported, began the process on February 1, and the other Northern states were sure to follow promptly. The border states of Maryland, West Virginia, and Missouri had all now abolished slavery, and they were expected to ratify it. But slavery persisted in Delaware and Kentucky, and the outcome in those states was doubtful. Even if they both approved, the votes of two additional states were needed—and those votes could only come from states that had been in the Confederacy. The most likely possibilities were Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. By recognizing the regimes that Lincoln had created in those states, congressmen could ensure the speedy death of slavery throughout the nation.

Congressmen, then, were in a receptive mood toward presidential reconstruction, and Lincoln, who had had very little to do with earlier congressional deliberations on the subject, now presented his case with great skill and force. He addressed the concerns of Radicals, who were beginning to argue that the only way to protect the rights of African-Americans in the South was to give them the ballot. Lincoln assured William D. Kelley that he, too, now believed in Negro suffrage, at least for the better educated and those who had served in the Union armies, and he showed the Pennsylvania congressman a copy of his letter to Governor Hahn of Louisiana, suggesting limited enfranchisement of blacks. Radical Senator B. Gratz Brown also saw a copy of that letter and quoted from it in urging his Missouri constituents to accept enfranchisement of Negroes as an “imperative necessity admitted on all sides.”

To present to Congress the more attractive side of the reconstruction government in Louisiana, Lincoln detained N. P. Banks in Washington for six
months so that the general, who had once been Speaker of the House of Representatives and still kept up his political contacts in the capital, could lobby in behalf of the regime he had helped to create. The President was also prepared to use brass-knuckle tactics if necessary. When the Radical abolitionists Wendell Phillips and George Luther Stearns tried to organize a protest against recognition of the Louisiana regime, they got nowhere. Congressmen told them, “A.L. has just now all the great offices to give afresh and can[’]t be successfully resisted. He is dictator.”

This combination of forces was strong enough to enable Lincoln to keep control of the reconstruction process in his own hands—but it was not quite enough to secure congressional approval of his actions. After the failure of Ashley’s reconstruction bill in mid-February, administration supporters moved to secure the admission of Louisiana. Lyman Trumbull, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, took the lead. In the past he had often been a severe, even waspish, critic of the President, but his attitude had remarkably softened since November. He seemed to have experienced what Ben Wade called “the most miraculous conversion that has taken place since St. Paul’s time”; possibly he recalled that his next race for the Senate would occur while Lincoln was still in the White House. At any rate, Trumbull conferred with the President about recognizing the reconstructed government of Louisiana and seating its two recently elected senators. As usual, Lincoln cut through the legal verbiage that surrounded these issues and put the issue plainly: “Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relations with the Union, sooner, by
admitting
or by
rejecting
the proposed Senators?”

A clear majority of the Republicans in the Senate joined Trumbull in following the President’s wishes, but a small group of Radicals resolved to block the move. Joined by Wade, Grimes, and a few other Radicals, Sumner began a filibuster against recognizing Louisiana that often deteriorated into an angry shouting match with the President’s supporters. He blasted “the pretended State government in Louisiana” as “a mere seven-months’ abortion, begotten by the bayonet in criminal conjunction with the spirit of caste, and born before its time, rickety, unformed, unfinished—whose continued existence will be a burden, a reproach, and a wrong.” The Radicals, who opposed the Louisiana regime because it did not give African-Americans the vote, worked in close cooperation with the Senate Democrats, who wanted to deny the suffrage to blacks; they shared only opposition to recognizing Lincoln’s government in Louisiana. Because of pressing business that the Senate had to attend to before adjourning, Trumbull was forced to give way, and the admission of Louisiana was defeated.

Lincoln was angry with Sumner. “He hopes to succeed in beating the President so as to change this Government from its original form and make it a strong centralized power,” he growled. According to Washington insiders, the cordial personal relations that had existed between the senator and Lincoln were at an end now that Sumner had “kicked the pet scheme of the
President down the marble steps of the Senate Chamber.” But Lincoln did not permit a difference over policy to become a personal quarrel; he not only genuinely liked and admired Sumner, but he needed his support in the future. Only a few days after Sumner had talked the Louisiana bill to death, the President invited him to the inaugural ball, where the senator promenaded with Mrs. Lincoln, richly dressed in white moire ornamented with lace, on his arm. The President could afford to be generous because he, like nearly everyone else, was certain that the next Congress would admit Louisiana. As the
New York Herald
predicted, “This extraordinary railsplitter enters upon his second term the unquestioned master of the situation in reference to American affairs, at home and abroad.”

Inauguration Day, March 4, 1865, began wet and windy. It had been raining for several days in Washington, and the streets were a sea of mud at least ten inches deep. During the previous week delegations from all parts of the country had been arriving in the capital, and all the hotels were full, with Willard’s accommodating overflow guests on cots in the hallways and parlors. Despite the abominable weather, a crowd began to gather at the east front of the Capitol before ten o’clock, and by the time the ceremonies began at noon, the spectators were sodden. Women, wearing their long, cumbersome dresses, were in a “most wretched, wretched plight,” Noah Brooks observed; “crinoline was smashed, skirts bedaubed, and moire antique, velvet, laces, and such dry goods were streaked with mud from end to end.”

First came the swearing in of the Vice President, which took place in the Senate chamber. Andrew Johnson had hoped to remain in Tennessee to witness the installation of a new, loyal state government under a constitution with “the foul blot of Slavery erased from her escutcheon,” but Lincoln and his advisers felt that it was unsafe for him not to be in Washington on March 4. Exhausted from the long trip, unsteady from a recent bout of typhoid fever, Johnson asked for some whiskey to calm his nerves. He was especially sensitive to alcohol, and the drink went to his head. In a long, maudlin speech he boasted of his plebeian origins and reminded the embarrassed members of the Supreme Court, the cabinet, and even the diplomatic corps—“with all your fine feathers and gewgaws”—that they were but creatures of the people. Lincoln had to sit silently through Johnson’s ramblings, and an observer noted that he “closed his eyes and seemed to retire into himself as though beset by melancholy reflections.” When Johnson finally finished and took the oath, the President leaned over to the parade marshal and whispered, “Do not let Johnson speak outside.”

Then the presidential party moved onto the platform at the east front of the Capitol. As Lincoln’s tall figure appeared, “cheer upon cheer arose, bands blatted upon the air, and flags waved all over the scene.” After the
sergeant-at-arms of the Senate quieted the crowd, the President stepped forward holding a half sheet of foolscap on which his inaugural address was printed in two columns. At just that moment the sun burst through the clouds and flooded the scene with light; Chief Justice Chase saw it as “an auspicious omen of the dispersion of the clouds of war and the restoration of the clear sun light of prosperous peace.”

In his clear, high-pitched voice that reached even the outer edges of the huge crowd, Lincoln read one of the shortest inaugural addresses in American history (703 words) and also the most memorable. He began by reminding his listeners that at this time there was “less occasion for an extended address” outlining policy than there had been at his first inauguration. During the past four years of war, he noted in a tone of weariness, “public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest.” Consequently he could devote the larger part of his address to an explanation of the origins of the conflict and an examination of its significance.

It was a remarkably impersonal address. After the opening paragraph, Lincoln did not use the first-person-singular pronoun, nor did he refer to anything he had said or done during the previous four years. Notably lacking from his brief account of how the war began was any attribution of blame. “All dreaded it—all sought to avert it.” But one of the parties to the conflict—throughout, he carefully avoided referring to the South or the Confederacy—“would
make
war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would
accept
war rather than let it perish.” Interrupted by a burst of applause at this point, Lincoln continued, “And the war came.” Slavery was, “somehow, the cause of the war.” It was the one institution that divided the nation. The people of both sections had shared values; they “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” In his one deviation from impartiality between the sections, Lincoln felt obliged to remark that “it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces,” but he promptly added, “Let us judge not that we be not judged.”

Lincoln then sought, both for himself and for the American people, an explanation of why the war was so protracted. His answer showed no trace of any late-at-night anguish over his own responsibility for the conflict. If there was guilt, the burden had been shifted from his shoulders to those of a Higher Power. The war continued because “the Almighty has His own purposes,” which are different from men’s purposes. This, Lincoln said later, was “a truth which I thought needed to be told,” because to deny it was “to deny that there is a God governing the world.”

He might have put his argument in terms of the doctrine of necessity, in which he had long believed; but that was not a dogma accepted by most Americans. In an earlier private meditation he had concluded that it was “probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end,”
thinking it “quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party” to the conflict. But that was too gnostic a doctrine to gain general credence. Addressing a devout, Bible-reading public, Lincoln knew he would be understood when he invoked the familiar doctrine of exact retribution, the belief that the punishment for a violation of God’s law would equal the offense itself. Quoting from Matthew, he announced, “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” That warning might seem to apply only to slaveholders, but Lincoln had consistently held Northerners as well as Southerners responsible for introducing slavery and for protecting it under the Constitution. Consequently, as God now willed to remove the offense of slavery, he gave “to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came.”

How long, then, would the war last, and when would retribution cease? In the summer of 1864, Lincoln had said that the war might go on for three more years. More recently he had spoken of another year, or at least another hundred days, of fighting. Now he offered no promises. Early in the address he said flatly, “With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.” Returning to the subject, he made no firmer pledge: “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” Then he went on to add one of the most terrible statements ever made by an American public official: “Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”

This was a harsh doctrine, but it was one that absolved both the South and the North of guilt for the never ending bloodshed. And, by leaving the execution of this sanguinary judgment to the Almighty, Lincoln could turn in his final paragraph to the more limited responsibilities of mortals. Here he had a chance to voice his deeply held sense of the nation’s debt to those who had fought, suffered, and died in the army and navy. Recently he had expressed that feeling in a beautiful letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, a Boston widow who, he was told, was “the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.” “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement,” he wrote her, “and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.” Now he returned to that theme, promising “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.”