The Fiery Trial (47 page)

Lincoln’s annual message included a long defense of emancipation and the enlisting of black soldiers. When announced the previous January, he reflected, these initiatives “gave to the future a new aspect, about which hope, and fear, and doubt contended.” Now, eleven months later, fear and doubt had dissipated. There had been no “servile insurrection,” and black soldiers had proven themselves in battle. The northern public had endorsed the new policy in the recent elections. Thus, what remained was hope. And for the nation to turn its back on the promise of freedom would not only relinquish an important “lever of power,” but constitute “a cruel and an astounding breach of faith.”

Lincoln then announced a new approach to Reconstruction. He offered full pardon and the restoration of all rights “except as to slaves” to Confederates who took an oath of future loyalty and pledged to accept the abolition of slavery “so long and so far as not modified or declared void by decision of the Supreme Court”—an odd statement that reflected his continuing fear of the possible abrogation of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln excluded from pardon high-ranking civil and military officers and those who had abused Union soldiers, including black troops, whom he specifically singled out. When in any state the number of loyal southerners, defined as those who took the oath, amounted to 10 percent of the votes cast in 1860, this minority could establish a new state government. Voting qualifications from before the war would apply, excluding blacks from the franchise. The new state constitution must abolish slavery and provide for the education of the freedpeople, but it could also adopt temporary measures regarding the freedpeople “consistent…with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class.” This, Lincoln observed, would limit the “confusion and destitution” resulting from a “total revolution of labor.” The new governments would be entitled to representation in Washington, although Lincoln took care to note that each house of Congress possessed the right to judge the qualifications of its own members. As for the border states to which Reconstruction did not apply since they remained in the Union, Lincoln declared that he remained committed to the plan he had “so earnestly urged upon this subject”—gradual, compensated emancipation.
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Clearly, Lincoln did not envision Reconstruction as embodying a social and political revolution beyond the abolition of slavery. His approach recognized the traditional power of the states to determine the civil and political rights of their inhabitants. He had always believed in the existence of a considerable body of Unionist whites and reluctant secessionists in the Confederacy and assumed that they would step forward to accept his terms. This militated in favor of leniency and against any pressure for black rights in the reconstructed South. Black suffrage would alienate such men, while the invitation to regulate the transition from slave to free labor, Lincoln explained, would make them “more ready” to accept his terms.

Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan would soon arouse considerable opposition from the Radicals. But when it was announced, as the
Chicago Tribune
observed, “all shades of opinion among loyal men” endorsed it. The conservative Republican press called the plan “the best that has yet been proposed.” It praised Lincoln for avoiding “abstract dogmas” like state suicide or the reversion of states to territories. While Lincoln eschewed their reckless race-mongering, the Blairs expressed approval since Lincoln had endorsed “
our speciality
”: state control over “local law”—law, that is, regulating blacks. Radicals, however, also praised the plan, since it recognized that the states were not in their traditional constitutional position. “If the old state is still a state in the Union,” Orestes Brownson asked, how could the president authorize one-tenth of the voters to establish a new government? Noting the praise Lincoln received from both wings of his party, the
New York Herald
quipped, “The art of riding two horses is not confined to the circus.”
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With the fate of emancipation still in some ways in the balance, the “pivotal point of the whole message,” the journalist Whitelaw Reid wrote, was its treatment of slavery. Charles Sumner was thrilled. “He makes emancipation the corner-stone of reconstruction,” he wrote, “and I am ready to accept any system which promises this result.” Because in this respect it rejected the position of conservative Republicans, one Boston newspaper declared that the message announced Lincoln’s “conversion to the radical programme.” Before Lincoln sent his message to Congress, Secretary of the Treasury Chase urged him, unsuccessfully, to drop the allusions to apprenticeship (which he considered “virtual reenslavement”) and a possible court ruling revoking the proclamation, and to modify it to allow “loyal citizens” to vote. But black suffrage had not yet become a major public issue. More important to most Radicals was that the idea of restoring the prewar Union—a Union with slavery—was dead.
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It would be a mistake to see Lincoln’s message as announcing a blueprint for Reconstruction from which he was determined never to deviate. The reporter Noah Brooks, who spoke regularly with the president, described the program as an outline, not a “finality.” Indeed, he wrote, “it is obvious that we are at sea in this whole matter of Reconstruction.” Rather than a design for the postwar South, the Ten Percent Plan, in the words of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, was “a war measure,” a strategy to encourage southern Unionism and make emancipation secure. Denying participation to both blacks and the disloyal majority of whites, the governments established under Lincoln’s proclamation would clearly lack full legitimacy. The
New York World
called these governments inverted pyramids in which a few thousand voters would determine the destiny of entire states. Fourteen hundred men, it pointed out, could establish a government in Florida and send two senators to Washington. Lincoln offered no explanation of how he had arrived at the 10 percent figure, although it clearly suggested a desire to organize new governments quickly. But in strictly military terms, for 10 percent of the voters of 1860 to pledge loyalty to the Union and detach their state from the Confederacy would constitute a significant victory. The adoption of state constitutions that abolished slavery, moreover, would counteract doubts about the legal foundations of emancipation and its fate if Democrats captured the presidency in 1864. As a military order, the Emancipation Proclamation could be rescinded by a future president. It was impossible, Lincoln reminded Andrew Johnson, to know “who is next to occupy the position I now hold, nor what he will do.”
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The decision to establish loyal governments that abolished slavery had unanticipated consequences, producing serious divisions among southern Unionists and allowing long-excluded groups to demand a share of political power. In both the border states and the Confederate South, Lincoln had to navigate complex political factionalism while promoting the goal of state-enacted emancipation. In doing so, he would allow Reconstruction in some states to diverge in significant ways from the Ten Percent Plan. Despite his stated preference for gradualism, he ended up supporting those who favored immediate emancipation. By the end of the war, with Lincoln’s strong backing, slavery had been abolished by state action in the border states of Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia, and in occupied Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. The willingness to abolish slavery, however, did not necessarily imply a willingness on the part of southern Unionists to grant former slaves equality before the law or recognize them as members of the postwar body politic.

III

T
HE BORDER STATES
that remained unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation and Ten Percent Plan were the first to reveal the consequences of tying Reconstruction to abolition. As the editor of the
New York Times
, Henry J. Raymond, observed in a speech in Delaware in November 1863, the presence of the Union army had already made “abolition a practical question of local politics” there. But the results varied dramatically from state to state. Delaware and Kentucky remained under the control of conservative Unionists who clung to the dying body of slavery. “Kentucky loyalty,” observed Jesse W. Fell, Lincoln’s longtime friend from Illinois, “means
loyalty to slavery
.” Even though the recruitment of black soldiers undermined slavery in these two states, it survived as a legal institution until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
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Elsewhere in the border, by contrast, new groups came to power eager to overthrow slavery and revolutionize state politics. West Virginia, which had entered the Union in 1863 committed to gradual abolition, decreed immediate emancipation by statute early in 1865. But instead of enfranchising African-Americans (a tiny percentage of the state’s population), Republicans sought to retain their hold on power by requiring voters to take an oath of past loyalty to the Union, thus disqualifying thousands of Confederate sympathizers. The same pattern held true in the other border and Upper South states that abolished slavery.
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In 1864, emancipation came to Maryland, a state divided between plantation counties that dominated the government thanks to a gerrymandered legislature, and a large region of small farms plus the industrial city of Baltimore, where much of the population resented slaveholder control. Federal troops occupied Maryland from the outset of the war. The “great army in blue,” one antislavery leader wrote, brought in its wake “a great army of ideas.” By 1863, with large numbers of slaves enlisting in the army or escaping to Washington, slavery in the state was disintegrating. Maryland Unionists accepted the inevitability of emancipation. But conservatives, headed by Montgomery Blair, hoped to institute a plan of gradual, compensated abolition, while Radicals, led by Congressman Henry Winter Davis, demanded immediate emancipation with no payment to slaveowners. Abolition, Davis insisted, would transform Maryland into a prosperous free-labor society and destroy the domination of “aristocratic” planters over yeomen and urban workers. To owners’ demands for compensation, Davis replied, “Their compensation is the cleared lands of all Southern Maryland, where everything that smiles and blossoms is the work of the negro that they tore from Africa.”
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Blair’s screeds against the Radicals were motivated in equal part by national and Maryland politics. His aim, he explained, was to “get rid of the slavery question in order that we may get at the negro question which lies immediately behind it.” He warned Augustus W. Bradford, Maryland’s governor and a Unionist reluctant to move against slavery, that the only way to “foil [the Radicals’] schemes entirely” was “by taking ground for emancipation.” By seizing the initiative, Blair believed, Maryland could prevent Congress from interfering in post-emancipation race relations. Lincoln tried to remain aloof from the contest between the followers of Blair and Davis, dividing patronage between the two factions and satisfying neither.
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Buoyed by strict loyalty oaths required of voters by the army, Unionists committed to abolition swept the Maryland elections of 1863 and proceeded to call a convention to rewrite the state constitution. In March 1864, shortly before it assembled, Lincoln made his own position clear: “I am very anxious for emancipation to be effected in Maryland,” he wrote to Congressman John A. J. Creswell, noting that this “would aid much to end the rebellion.” Lincoln added that his “preference for
gradual
over
immediate
emancipation” had been “misunderstood.” He still thought that gradual abolition would “produce less confusion, and destitution,” but if the convention should “prefer the
immediate
, most certainly I have no objection.” The main point was for the friends of emancipation not to allow “jealousies, rivalries, and consequent ill-blood” to derail the abolition of slavery.

In April 1864, shortly before the convention assembled, Lincoln traveled to Baltimore to deliver remarks at the opening of the Sanitary Fair (an exposition to raise money for medical supplies and to assist needy and disabled Union soldiers) and to promote the cause of emancipation. He reflected on how the war had revealed the contested nature of the core American value, freedom:

In this parable, Lincoln himself was the shepherd; the sheep were slaves advancing toward freedom; the wolf, the slaveholding South; and the voters of Maryland, agents of the triumph of the free-labor understanding of liberty. The description of slaveholders as wolves was not the kind of language Lincoln had used before the Civil War, when he generally went out of his way to deny any personal animus toward white southerners. It could be taken to imply that reconciliation would prove difficult after the war.

Over the objections of delegates who proclaimed it “robbery,” the convention abolished slavery immediately and prohibited the legislature from compensating the former owners. Reflecting the shift in political power that had taken place, it reapportioned the legislature to reduce the power of the plantation counties, established the state’s first free, tax-supported school system, and limited voting to those who took a loyalty oath far more stringent than the one Lincoln had included in his Ten Percent Plan. But only a handful of emancipationists demonstrated any concern for the fate of the state’s 80,000 slaves. The school system excluded their children, and suffrage was limited to whites.
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