The Fiery Trial (48 page)

In the fall of 1864 Lincoln urged Maryland voters to approve the new constitution. They did so on October 13 by the narrowest of margins, 400 votes in a turnout of 60,000. On the day before the election, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a Marylander, died. Many Republicans shared the reaction of George Templeton Strong, the opinionated New York diarist: “Two ancient abuses and evils were perishing together.” On November 1, the day the constitution went into effect, Lincoln addressed a group of blacks who paraded to the White House. “It is difficult to realize,” he remarked, “that in the state, where human slavery has existed for ages…the soil is made forever free.” He urged former slaves to “improve yourselves, both morally and intellectually.” The air of celebration, however, was soon dispelled as Maryland’s courts assigned thousands of black children, against the vociferous objections of their parents, to labor under long-term indentures for their former masters in a blatant attempt to continue planters’ access to unfree labor.
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The other border state to experience wartime reconstruction was Missouri, whose Unionists remained even more hopelessly divided than Maryland’s by what Lincoln called a “pestilent factional quarrel.” Conservatives pressed for gradual, compensated emancipation and lenient treatment of Confederates; Radicals for immediate abolition and the disenfranchisement of rebels. Each group bombarded Lincoln with complaints about the other. Lincoln sought without success to reconcile them and expressed exasperation with their ongoing feud. He had been “tormented…beyond endurance” by Missouri factionalism, he complained at one point. “Neither side pays the least respect to my appeals to…reason.”
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In June 1863 the Missouri state convention, which in 1861 had become a rallying point for Unionists against the pro-secessionist legislature, reassembled and adopted a plan of gradual emancipation that would not begin until 1870. As a form of nonmonetary compensation, elderly slaves would remain in bondage for life and young ones would work as indentured servants until the age of twenty-three. As the delegates deliberated, General John M. Schofield, the military commander in Missouri, asked for instructions. Lincoln replied by reiterating his belief that “
gradual
can be made better than
immediate
for both black and white, except when military necessity changes the case,” but that the delay before abolition took hold should be “comparatively short.” Missouri slaves, however, did not desire to wait seven more years for freedom. “The slaves are leaving by hundreds every day,” James S. Rollins, one of the state’s congressmen, reported. The “self-emancipated ‘chattels,’” quipped a Kansas City newspaper, “seem to prefer emancipation without compensation.”
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Missouri Radicals now launched a campaign for immediate emancipation. In September 1863 the Radicals sent a seventy-man delegation, headed by the St. Louis lawyer Charles D. Drake, to lobby Lincoln for the removal of General Schofield, whom they accused, with justification, of siding with their foes. Two days before their meeting with Lincoln, Frank Blair, in a speech in St. Louis, lashed out at the Radicals, opposing immediate emancipation. Despite his long association with the Blairs, Lincoln tried to avoid taking sides. He would not, he declared, get involved in “the political differences between radicals and conservatives.” He refused to oust Schofield but expressed regret that the onset of emancipation in Missouri had been put off to 1870. According to John Hay, Lincoln in October remarked that the Radicals would probably win control of Missouri, “and I do not object to it. They are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and in sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally. They are utterly lawless—the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with—but after all their faces are set Zionwards.” In December 1863 Lincoln did remove Schofield, replacing him with General William Rosecrans, who he hoped would play a more even-handed role in Missouri politics.
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The following fall, after many more months of charges and countercharges between the two factions, Radical Unionists elected Thomas C. Fletcher as governor. In January 1865, a constitutional convention decreed immediate abolition in Missouri as well as other reforms, including the establishment of a public school system and the end of imprisonment for debt. Thanks to Drake, who insisted that while blacks could not be “lifted into equality,” many “disqualifications, prohibitions, and degradations are to be removed,” to ensure that “freedom…is no empty name,” the new constitution granted blacks equal access to the courts and empowered the legislature to establish schools for black children. Drake himself favored black suffrage. But instead of expanding the right to vote, the convention established stringent loyalty requirements. Those entitled to vote approved the new constitution in June 1865.
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Unlike in the border states (other than Missouri, where martial law persisted for the entire war), wartime Reconstruction took place in the occupied Confederacy under the auspices of military rule. Here, too, Lincoln pressed for abolition by state action. The first Confederate state to embrace emancipation was the Restored Government of Virginia. Early in 1864, a diminutive constitutional convention of sixteen delegates abolished slavery, restricted suffrage to loyal whites, and provided for a system of public education for white children. Although it had no authority in most of Virginia and could not muster anywhere near the support of 10 percent of the voters of 1860, Lincoln continued to recognize this regime as Virginia’s legitimate government.
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Lincoln had long seen Arkansas, with considerable Unionist sentiment in its mountainous northwestern counties, as a promising place to create a loyal state government. As soon as he announced his Reconstruction plan, Lincoln dispatched a military officer to the state with forms to record the names of those who took the oath of loyalty. Lincoln advised the military commander, General Frederick Steele, to be sure to have a “free State constitutional provision in some unquestionable form” when a new government was established. A few days later, mindful of developments elsewhere, Lincoln added, “Of all things, avoid, if possible, a dividing into cliques.” Bypassing the holding of an election under the Ten Percent Plan, Arkansas Unionists organized a self-appointed constitutional convention, which assembled in Little Rock in January 1864. Lincoln directed Steele to cooperate with it. The delegates quickly approved a new constitution that abolished slavery, restricted suffrage to whites, and authorized the legislature to establish an indenture system for blacks modeled on the one in the Illinois constitution of 1818. They also passed an ordinance prohibiting the further entrance of blacks into the state, except under federal authority. The constitution was ratified in March 1864, with more than 20 percent of the 1860 voters participating. Although it had not been created in accordance with his Ten Percent Plan, Lincoln directed General Steele to recognize the authority of the new state government.
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Lincoln devoted the greatest attention to Reconstruction in Tennessee and Louisiana. By the fall of 1863, Military Governor Andrew Johnson, who had persuaded Lincoln to exempt Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation, had, at the president’s urging, declared for emancipation. But when Lincoln announced the Ten Percent Plan, Johnson and his supporters were dismayed. Horace Maynard, a member of Congress from East Tennessee, where pro-Union families had suffered severely under Confederate rule, complained that the plan displayed “excessive liberality” to rebels. On his own initiative, Johnson added to Lincoln’s oath of future loyalty “a hard oath—a tight oath” whereby prospective voters had to pledge that they “ardently” desired Confederate defeat and the abolition of slavery. Despite numerous complaints from Tennessee, Lincoln allowed Johnson’s requirement to stand. He saw “no conflict,” he observed, between Johnson’s policy and his own.
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Johnson’s conversion to emancipation did not imply a sudden interest in the welfare of Tennessee’s blacks. He had risen to prominence in Tennessee politics as a self-proclaimed tribune of nonslaveholding yeomen and condemned the “slaveocracy” for monopolizing political power and oppressing poor whites. He would rather, he said in 1863, see all the slaves sent to “their fatherland…and Africa distinct from this earth, as a planet, out of the world’s orbit, rather than any injury should happen to the government.” But as white Tennesseans resisted his efforts to form a state government while blacks enlisted in the Union army, his outlook seemed to change. Johnson rejected demands by black leaders in Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville for the right to vote (which free blacks had enjoyed in Tennessee until 1835). But he sketched out a vision of Tennessee’s future in which the end of slavery would bring an “era of freedom” for both ordinary whites and emancipated slaves. The freedman would work for wages, enjoy “the fruits of one’s labor,” and “if he can rise by his own energies, in the name of God let him rise.” In October 1864, addressing a black gathering, Johnson, by then Lincoln’s vice presidential running mate, unilaterally decreed the end of slavery in Tennessee. “I will indeed be your Moses,” he promised, “and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage to a promised future of liberty and peace.” Early in 1865, having failed to get civilian government functioning, Johnson bypassed elections altogether and endorsed the assembling of a self-appointed convention of Unionists, which adopted a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery without compensation. This was approved in February by those Tennesseans allowed to vote under Johnson’s requirements.
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Of all the states where wartime Reconstruction was attempted, only Louisiana lay in the heart of the Confederacy. Here Lincoln invested his greatest hopes. Union forces, it will be recalled, in 1862 had occupied New Orleans and the nearby sugar parishes, a region with a considerable population of reluctant Confederates—former Whig planters, European immigrants, and northerners. The city was also home to a community of 11,000 free persons of color, many of them prosperous and well educated. Descended from unions between early French settlers and slave women or from free black immigrants from Haiti, they were strongly influenced by the currents of radical thought that swept the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution and again in 1848. If the Unionists could cooperate, the prospects for creating a loyal government seemed bright. In the fall of 1862 New Orleans voters sent Michael Hahn, an immigrant from Bavaria, and Benjamin Flanders, a New Hampshire–born teacher and newspaper editor, to Congress. They represented a Free State movement that saw emancipation as the key to remaking Louisiana in the image of the free-labor North.
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In order to encourage white Unionism, Lincoln exempted southern Louisiana from the Emancipation Proclamation. But in August 1863, as he was promoting abolition in the border and Upper South, Lincoln instructed General Nathaniel P. Banks to organize a constitutional convention that would abolish slavery in Louisiana. Lincoln reiterated his preference for “gradual, and not sudden emancipation,” and his promise that the state could adopt “some practical system by which the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other.” Nothing, however, transpired. On November 5, Lincoln again wrote to Banks, expressing frustration at the lack of progress and urging him to “waste no more time” in establishing a loyal government. Lincoln made it clear that abolition was the sine qua non of Reconstruction—he would not cooperate with “professedly loyal men” who did not accept the end of slavery.
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Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan was motivated, in considerable measure, by a desire to speed up Reconstruction in Louisiana by attracting as many whites as possible to the process. He implored Louisiana Unionists, to no avail, to “stoutly eschew cliquism” and cooperate toward the common goals of reunion and emancipation. Unfortunately, as in other states, Lincoln soon had to deal with an acrimonious division within Unionist ranks. The split began in a dispute over whether a constitutional convention should precede or follow the creation of a civilian government. It was exacerbated by Secretary of the Treasury Chase’s use of patronage appointments to build support for his unannounced bid for the presidency in 1864. But increasingly, it came to focus on what rights blacks would enjoy in a free Louisiana.
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The contentious issue of black suffrage first came to national attention via Louisiana. The free black community demanded the right to vote in elections to create a new state government. Lincoln, who up to this point had never supported black suffrage, did not object. In August 1863, Secretary of War Stanton, with Lincoln’s approval, sent instructions to Louisiana authorizing the registration of “all the loyal citizens” as voters, with no mention of race. Even though the Ten Percent Plan, announced in December, ruled out black suffrage, Stanton sent another such authorization in January 1864. General Banks, however, feared that allowing free blacks to vote would alienate the vast majority of white residents, including most Unionists. “Legislation in regard to the negro, beyond emancipation,” he informed Lincoln, would be “unacceptable to moderate men,” whose support he considered indispensable. In February 1864, Banks organized an election for a new state government under the prewar constitution, which recognized slavery and severely restricted the rights of blacks. Hahn and Flanders presented themselves as candidates for governor. Hahn’s campaign freely used racist language, calling his opponent’s supporters “Negro-heads” and “Negro-Equality men,” thus exacerbating the split among Unionists and alarming Radicals in the North. In fact, at this point, only a handful of white Radicals in Louisiana supported black voting rights. (“I am only sorry that the epithets were not better deserved,” Chase remarked.) Hahn was elected governor, and Banks pressed ahead with plans for a constitutional convention.
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