Lincoln (98 page)

Inevitably these political maneuvers affected Lincoln’s program for reconstructing the Southern states. Always alert to what they perceived as a threat of Caesarism, Democrats immediately saw political implications in the 10 percent plan. “By setting up ... state governments, representing one-tenth of the voters, in Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina,” the
New York World
noted, Lincoln could “control as many electoral votes as
may be needed to turn the scale” in the next presidential election, and it reminded its readers that if the President was successful “one voter in Arkansas will exert as much political power as ten citizens of New York.” Governor Horatio Seymour pointed out that under Lincoln’s plan 70,000 men in the reconstructed Southern states could cast as many electoral votes as the 16,000,000 residents of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Kentucky, and Wisconsin.

But Republicans, in the general applause that immediately followed Lincoln’s proclamation of amnesty, initially paid little attention to the political implications of his message. The House of Representatives promptly created a special committee on reconstruction to devise legislation to carry out the President’s plan. Though it was chaired by Henry Winter Davis, a critic of the administration, the committee throughout January and February concentrated on a bill introduced by James M. Ashley that largely followed the President’s ideas but also provided for Negro suffrage.

But then Republican congressmen began receiving reports on the political activities of the President’s agents in the Southern states that were under the control of the Union army. In Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, who had been serving as military governor since 1862, seemed less interested in building broad-based Unionist sentiment than in constructing his own political faction pledged to the reelection of Lincoln. In Arkansas the President entrusted reconstruction to General Frederick Steele, whom he advised to cooperate with an irregularly convened constitutional convention in which it was doubtful whether a single delegate had authority to represent a county. Lincoln was aware that there were doubts about the legitimacy of this Arkansas regime, but he instructed Steele not to worry over legal niceties; if the provisional government abolished slavery, the general could “fix the rest.” In Florida, learning that “some worthy gentlemen” wanted to restore a loyal government, the President sent his private secretary, John Hay, with blank books to record the oaths of those who swore allegiance. The effort was not successful, for the military force supporting the scheme was defeated at Olustee on February 20, and Hay was unable to gather the 1,400 signatures required to make up 10 percent of the state’s 1860 voters. To Lincoln’s critics these moves suggested that the Chief Executive was trying to use the military to set up governments that would support his own reelection.

Louisiana provided the real test both of presidential intentions and of congressional perceptions. It was more important, both strategically and diplomatically, than any other Southern state yet conquered by the Union armies. Situated at the mouth of the Mississippi River, it offered the best launching pad for Union military expeditions against Texas and other regions under the control of Confederate General Edmund Kirby-Smith, and it could also be a base for operations against Mobile. With its French and Spanish traditions, Louisiana was better known to Europeans than any other Southern state, and New Orleans, the largest city in the seceded states, was
a major port. If Louisiana could be made a showcase of reconstruction, Europeans would receive an inescapable signal of the inevitable collapse of the Confederacy.

Ever since Farragut captured New Orleans in April 1862, Lincoln had been hoping for the reorganization of Louisiana as a loyal state and its readmission to the Union. Initially he hoped that Louisiana Unionists, who claimed to be in a majority, would reassert themselves, disavow the ordinance of secession, and return to the Union, but he found them reluctant to take the initiative. They wanted, he said, “to touch neither a sail nor a pump, but to be merely passengers,—dead-heads at that—to be carried snug and dry, throughout the storm, and safely landed right side up.” Consequently neither Benjamin F. Butler, the Union military commander, nor George F. Shepley, whom the President named military governor of the state, was able to make much progress in persuading Louisianians to return to their old allegiance. But the President continued to push for the organization of a loyal government. Pressing Butler and Shepley to register voters and hold local elections, he insisted on prompt action. “Do not waste a day about it,”’ he directed. “Follow forms of law as far as convenient, but at all events get the expression of the largest number of the people possible.” He cautioned that these elections must represent the real residents of Louisiana, not the Union soldiers nor the Northern carpetbaggers in the state. “To send a parcel of Northern men here, as representatives, elected as would be understood, (and perhaps really so,) at the point of the bayonet,” he informed Shepley, “would be disgusting and outrageous.” But the results were meager. In December 1862, Butler staged elections in the two congressional districts under federal military control, and Benjamin F. Flanders and Michael Hahn, both of New Orleans, were sent to Washington. Neither represented any sizable constituency. After long debates over their credentials, they were given seats in the House of Representatives just as the term expired.

The President hoped for better things from Nathaniel P. Banks, who replaced Butler at the end of 1862, but he gave the general a larger task. Since his Emancipation Proclamation had applied only to the areas still in rebel hands, it had left slavery intact in the most prosperous and populous region of the state around New Orleans. Now, convinced that the war was soon coming to an end, Lincoln was troubled that Louisiana might apply for readmission as a slave state. To prevent that course, he desired Banks to sponsor the creation of a free-state government that would end slavery throughout Louisiana. To sugarcoat the pill, he declared that he was willing to accept “some practical system by which the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.” But Lincoln did not think he had authority to require the elimination of slavery throughout the state. “While I very well know what I would be glad for Louisiana to do,” he wrote Banks, “it is quite a different thing for me to assume direction of the matter.”

During the first half of 1863 little progress was made in setting up a loyal government in Louisiana, because Banks was preoccupied first with his campaign against Port Hudson on the Mississippi River and then with a planned expedition against Confederate Texas. In August, Lincoln gave him a strong nudge, urging him to confer with “intelligent and trusty citizens of the State” like Hahn and Flanders and endorsing a plan for Louisiana Attorney General Thomas J. Durant to register eligible voters in preparation for a state constitutional convention.

Four months later the President found to his dismay that nothing had been done. Bitterly disappointed, he told Banks to get on with the job—only to learn that the general claimed that he did not know he was responsible for reorganizing a state government in Louisiana and that, besides, whatever moves he had made in that direction had been frustrated by Shepley and Durant. Firmly Lincoln reminded Banks that he was the supreme authority in his military district. “I now tell you that in every dispute, with whomsoever, you are master,” he wrote, and, to make the point emphatic, he repeated the word “master” three more times in the same letter.

Before he received the President’s letter, Banks had already begun work to establish a free-state government in Louisiana. “It can be effected now in sixty days,—let me say even in
thirty
days, if necessary—with less public excitement than would attend the ennactment [sic] of a ‘dog Law’ in one of the eastern States,” he promised Lincoln, with his usual overoptimism. In his newfound zeal, Banks decided to take a shortcut. Instead of calling a convention to draw up a new constitution for the state, he decided that “the
only speedy and certain
method” of accomplishing the President’s objective was to hold elections under the antebellum Louisiana constitution, merely declaring that all provisions in that document relating to slavery were
“inoperative and void.
”

This was not the procedure Lincoln had suggested, nor was it the process favored by Thomas J. Durant and other members of the Free-State General Committee. In their view the entire state constitution needed revision, not merely to eradicate slavery but also to eliminate inequities in representation that had favored the planter class. They pointed out that, under Banks’s proposal, voters would only be required to swear to accept the Emancipation Proclamation, which left the institution of slavery intact in much of Louisiana. In that event, they warned, “There is nothing to prevent the continuance of this as a Slave State if the pro-slavery party get control.” But Banks justified his course to the President as one “far more acceptable to the Citizens of Louisiana” than submitting the question of slavery to an election, since “their self respect, their
Amour propre
will be appeased if they are not required to vote for or against it.”

Lincoln approved Banks’s decision and urged him to go right ahead with the election of seven state officers planned for February 22. Durant, Flanders, and others in the Free-State General Committee were unhappy with Banks’s action, but their objections carried little weight with him since
Durant, their principal spokesmen, had originally been a very conservative Unionist, who once complained that the presence of Union troops in Louisiana disrupted the relationship between masters and slaves. The President failed to see an enormous difference between Banks’s program of holding state elections before holding a constitutional convention and the Free-State Committee’s plan for choosing a constitutional convention before holding state elections. Besides, Lincoln was always loyal to his subordinates when they were attempting, however awkwardly, to carry out his wishes, and he could hardly disavow Banks’s actions after having repeatedly urged him to move.

Lincoln watched with some satisfaction as the election came off smoothly enough on February 22, with the participation of about 11,000 voters who had sworn to support the Union and, the presidential proclamations concerning slavery. Hahn, Banks’s candidate, was chosen governor over both Flanders, the candidate of the Free-State Union men, and J. Q. A. Fellows, a Conservative. Jubilantly the general reported to the President: “The change that has occurred in this state since Jan: 1863 is without paralell [sic], in history,” and he promised that Louisiana would now become “one of the most loyal and prosperous states, that the world has ever seen.”

Lincoln probably discounted Banks’s enthusiasm, but he was encouraged by these developments. He thought the setting up of a free-state government in Louisiana, to be followed shortly by a constitutional convention, marked an important step in the restoration of that state to the Union—but only an initial step. He was not entirely happy about the victory of the more conservative wing of the free-state movement, and he was sensitive both to the demands of justice for the newly freed blacks and to the pressures from their abolitionist allies in the North. Even while congratulating Michael Hahn “as the first-free-state Governor of Louisiana,” he asked “whether some of the colored people ...—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks” should be permitted to vote. That would help “to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.” But, hesitating to overstep his constitutional powers, he offered this advice “only [as] a suggestion.”

Many Republican congressmen looked on developments in Louisiana with suspicion. Antislavery men already distrusted Banks because he had set up a labor system in Louisiana that allowed plantation owners to employ former slaves as sharecroppers who would receive one-fourteenth of the crops produced. With restrictions on the movement of freedmen, the system seemed to many Northern observers only a slight improvement over slavery. Republican congressmen heard regularly from disaffected Free-State Union leaders about Banks’s plans for reorganizing the state government, and Durant warned them that the general adhered to “the absurd and despotic doctrine that ‘the fundamental law of the State is martial law,’ i.e. the caprice of a military officer.” Sensitive to the interests of the more Radical Republicans in Congress, Free-State General Committee leaders raised the issue of
Negro suffrage as a weapon in their war against Banks. Unaware of Lincoln’s private interest in this matter, they publicly proposed enfranchising the “free men of color” of Louisiana—i.e., those blacks and mulattoes who had been free before the war, but not the general population of freedmen—while Banks believed this question could wait until other, more pressing issues were resolved.

Inescapably, Northern Republicans came to recognize the political implications of the reconstruction efforts Lincoln was promoting in the South. Once these states were reorganized and recognized, they would be eligible to send delegates to the Republican National Convention and to cast their electoral votes in the next presidential election. The factional lines among Unionists in the Southern states were not always clear, but in general those who favored a reorganization under the presidential plan were likely to be Lincoln supporters. In Louisiana, for instance, one conservative rejoiced in the election of Michael Hahn as “a triumph over Mr. Chase and all his faction,” which would send “our worthy President” the message that the people of Louisiana were “willing that the State should be free, but
they cannot stand Radicalism.”