The Fiery Trial (50 page)

Soon afterward, mindful, perhaps, of the growing criticism of the labor systems of Generals Banks and Thomas, Lincoln advised the latter that when plantations were leased to loyal men in the Mississippi Valley, care should be taken to ensure “fairness to the laborers.” In February 1864 Lincoln sent General Daniel E. Sickles to the Mississippi Valley to report on how many Confederates were taking up his offer of amnesty, how Andrew Johnson’s regime in Tennessee was faring, and “the colored people—how they get along as soldiers, as laborers in our service, on leased plantations, and as hired laborers with their old masters.” The redoubtable Sickles, who had lost a leg at the battle of Gettysburg, embarked on a tour that took him to parts of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. He enjoyed a lavish reception at a plantation near New Orleans, complete with “some grotesque dancing by the youthful darkies.” Whether this enabled Sickles to assess the labor situation in the occupied South may be doubted. When he returned to Washington, he gave Lincoln his impressions of the journey verbally. Save for one letter about illicit trading with the enemy by army officers in Memphis, Sickles did not produce a written report. In August 1864 Lincoln met again with John Eaton and questioned him closely about the emancipated slaves. He asked about “the more remarkable colored men and women” who had escaped, what they might do when they returned home, and “what freedom meant to those who had attained it.”
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By 1864 Lincoln’s thoughts about ending slavery had changed in significant ways. In this, he reflected broader trends in northern public sentiment. Deeply rooted “theories and prejudices,” the
New York Times
observed in February 1864, were rapidly being “discarded.” “It is extraordinary,” the editors noted, “how completely the idea of
gradual
emancipation has been dissipated from the public mind everywhere by the progress of events.”
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The same, it could have added, was true of colonization. No new consensus, however, on the role of the former slaves in the postwar world had emerged. Lincoln himself viewed this question less on its own merits than in terms of its effect on securing white loyalty in the South and emancipation by state action. But in 1864, with Congress back in session, a presidential election looming, and concerns rising in the North over the course of wartime Reconstruction, the question of what should follow the end of slavery emerged as a battleground in national politics.

I

“W
HAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE NEGRO?”
The
New York Times
posed this question on the eve of Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, and as the end of the Civil War drew nearer, more and more Americans came to see it as the most difficult dilemma confronting the nation. But as Leonard Marsh, a northern pamphleteer, shrewdly observed at the war’s outset, this question had as much to do with whites as with blacks. It really meant, Marsh wrote, “how will their freedom affect us?” Or, to put it another way, what kind of society was post-slavery America to be?
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The Civil War unleashed a dynamic debate over the meaning of American freedom and the definition and entitlements of American citizenship, a debate that continues to this day. When the Thirty-eighth Congress assembled in December 1863, a writer in the
Continental Monthly
declared, “Reconstruction sounds the key-note of American politics today.” According to his secretary John Hay, Lincoln believed that Republicans agreed on most aspects of Reconstruction. “The only question,” Lincoln remarked, “is who constitute the State?” But that was the crucial point. Abolitionists, black and white, maintained that emancipation would remain incomplete until black men had been guaranteed the right to vote. Without the ballot, wrote the
Weekly Anglo-African
, freedom would be “unworthy of the name.” In a speech at Cooper Institute that December, Wendell Phillips objected to the lack of provision for black suffrage or equality before the law, indeed for any role whatever for blacks, in Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan. Lincoln’s approach, Phillips complained, “frees the slave and ignores the negro.” Presciently, he warned that the president’s invitation to southern whites to control the transition from slavery to freedom opened the door to “poor laws, vagrant laws, laws for debt” that would reduce the freedpeople to a new condition of servitude. Phillips praised Lincoln as “a growing man” whose views had changed enormously since the war began and might well change again. Abolitionists, he concluded, must persuade Lincoln to adopt “a method of reconstruction much safer and better than the one he has suggested.”
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The debate over Reconstruction was intimately connected to another political initiative in the first months of 1864. As Lincoln pressed for state-enacted emancipation in the border states and occupied South, abolitionists and many Republicans turned to a different route to full freedom: a constitutional amendment irrevocably abolishing slavery throughout the United States. Abolitionists had already launched a “fresh moral agitation” toward this goal, coordinated by the Women’s National Loyal League, headed by the abolitionist-feminists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In February 1864, two black men carried a “monster” petition with 100,000 signatures to the Senate floor and deposited it onto Charles Sumner’s desk. More petitions followed; by mid-1864 the number of signers had reached 400,000. Support for an amendment reached far beyond abolitionist ranks. In March, a correspondent reported to Lincoln that Boston’s merchants, who previously believed “that you must not interfere with the slave system,” now agreed “that slavery must be utterly destroyed before there can be any solid peace.”
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Just before Lincoln sent his annual message to Congress in December 1863, Congressman Isaac N. Arnold of Illinois urged him to include a recommendation for a change in the Constitution to rid the nation of slavery. Lincoln chose not to do so. As we have seen, he had decided to pursue abolition on a state-by-state basis as part of his plan for Reconstruction. Nonetheless, such amendments were quickly introduced in both houses. The final language, modeled on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, was hammered out in the Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by Lyman Trumbull: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (Thus, in the act of abolition, the amendment, for the first time, introduced the word “slavery” into the Constitution.) The Judiciary Committee rejected wording proposed by Charles Sumner based on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1791: “all persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave.” Jacob Howard of Michigan urged Sumner to “dismiss all reference to French constitutions or French codes, and go back to…good old Anglo-Saxon language.” But Trumbull did incorporate a second clause proposed by Sumner: “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
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On February 10, 1864, Trumbull presented the amendment to the Senate. Various acts of Congress and the Emancipation Proclamation, he noted, had freed many slaves but had not destroyed the legal foundations of slavery. The only way of ridding the country of the institution and preventing its rebirth was to amend the Constitution. At first, not all Republicans agreed. Some, like Lincoln, preferred abolition to take place through state action. Others believed an amendment unnecessary; the war, they argued, gave Congress the power to abolish slavery by statute and it should do so immediately rather than going through the cumbersome amendment process. But as time went on, congressional Republicans rallied around the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln remained noncommittal. When John D. Defrees of Indiana asked him to endorse the proposal, Lincoln replied, “Our own friends have this under consideration now, and will do as much without a message as with it.”
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At first, it seemed possible that the amendment would attract significant Democratic support. James Brooks, a Democratic congressman from New York, surprised the House in February by declaring the abolition of slavery “a fixed fact, a fact accomplished.” Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland became the most prominent Democrat to endorse the amendment. Slavery, he declared, was “an evil of the highest character,” and “a prosperous and permanent peace” could never be achieved “if the institution is permitted to survive.” Johnson added that by escaping to Union lines at the first opportunity, slaves had demonstrated their “inextinguishable right to freedom.”
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As the spring went on, however, and election-year politics moved to the fore, Democratic willingness to support the amendment faded. The party’s congressmen increasingly reiterated the familiar arguments against abolition, among them that the end of slavery would lead inexorably to “amalgamation” and black political equality. These charges forced Republicans to try to delineate the basic rights that belonged to all Americans, which slavery had denied and emancipation would restore. All agreed that contractual relations must be substituted for the discipline of the lash and the master’s authority over the personal and family lives of the former slaves abolished. All denied Democratic charges that freedom automatically conferred the right to vote; this, they insisted, was a matter for individual states to regulate.
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Here, agreement ended. In keeping with long-standing traditions of federalism, some supporters of the amendment, like John Henderson of Missouri, insisted, “We give him no right except his freedom, and leave the rest to the States.” On the other end of the political spectrum, Radical Republicans embraced Sumner’s egalitarian vision. “A new nation” would emerge from the war, declared Isaac N. Arnold, one “wholly free,” in which “liberty,
equality before the law
is to be the great cornerstone.” James Harlan of Iowa listed among the evils of slavery the denial of the rights to marry, own property, testify in court, and enjoy access to education; presumably emancipation would carry with it these essential human entitlements. No phrase was repeated more often in these discussions than one Lincoln had emphasized in the late 1850s: the right to the fruits of one’s labor. Ebon Ingersoll of Illinois spoke of the “right to till the soil, to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, and to enjoy the rewards of his labor.” Republicans assumed that the amendment’s second clause empowered Congress to prevent states from denying freed slaves these opportunities. The debates over the Thirteenth Amendment offered a foretaste of the more far-reaching discussion of the meaning of American freedom that would follow the Civil War.
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Much of the discussion covered familiar ground. One element, however, was new, reflecting the ideological changes unleashed by the war. Republicans condemned slavery not simply as a violation of basic human rights but as an affront to the nation itself. The institution violated the principle that each individual owed undivided loyalty to the nation-state. “The defiant pretensions of the master, claiming control of his slave,” declared Sumner, “are in direct conflict with the paramount rights of the national government.” The amendment’s second clause embodied this new sense of national empowerment. Traditionally, the federal government had been seen as the greatest threat to individual liberty; thus, the Bill of Rights protected civil liberties by restricting the actions of Congress, not the states. But, as the
Chicago Tribune
observed, “events have proved that the danger to…freedom is from the states, not the Federal government.” The second clause gave Congress seemingly unlimited authority to prevent actions by states, localities, and private individuals that sought to establish or restore slavery, a startling change in the federal system. The seemingly redundant words “or involuntary servitude” opened the door to congressional legislation against indentures or apprenticeship arrangements such as Lincoln had proposed.
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On April 8, 1864, the Senate approved the Thirteenth Amendment by a vote of 33 to 6. The four senators from Kentucky and Delaware and two northern Democrats voted no. The majority included all the Republicans, three Democrats from the North, and five border senators. Because the amendment envisioned immediate, uncompensated abolition by national action, the
New York Herald
called the result a rebuke to Lincoln, a declaration by Congress that “his petty tinkering devices of emancipation will not answer.” But in June, in a vote almost entirely along party lines, the amendment mustered 93 votes in the House, 13 short of the necessary two-thirds’ majority. Only four Democrats voted in favor.
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The Thirteenth Amendment was one of a number of measures relating to blacks’ postwar status debated in the first months of 1864. When Congress assembled, George W. Julian, chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, launched a campaign to repeal the joint resolution of 1862 that limited the confiscation of land to the owner’s lifetime. Long an enemy of “land monopoly,” Julian insisted that without economic autonomy the former slaves would be reduced to a situation “more galling than slavery itself.” Many members still resented what they considered Lincoln’s high-handedness when he insisted that Congress adopt the joint resolution before he agreed to sign the Second Confiscation Act. In 1864, each house approved a different measure repealing the 1862 resolution, although no joint measure was enacted. In any event, Lincoln saw the restoration of confiscated land as a means of promoting white southern Unionism. His promise to restore property other than slaves to southerners who took an oath of loyalty meant that the amount of land available for redistribution remained negligible.
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Also the subject of prolonged debate was the recommendation by the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission that Congress establish a Bureau of Emancipation to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom. Supporters insisted that emancipation had made blacks “wards of the republic” and that the federal government, as B. Gratz Brown, the Radical senator from Missouri, put it, had an obligation to prevent them “from being made serfs or apprentices” after the war ended. Democrats characterized the proposed bureau as a “sweeping and revolutionary” expansion of federal power. Even among Republicans, the idea encountered resistance from those who believed that long-term guardianship would undermine blacks’ self-reliance. “Are they free men, or are they not?” asked Senator James W. Grimes. “If they are free men, why not let them stand as free men?” Lincoln did not express his own views, and Congress took no action before the session ended.
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Congress did manage to enact other measures weakening slavery and expanding the rights of black Americans. In June 1864 it repealed the Fugitive Slave Act, which had incongruously remained on the books despite emancipation. The session also enacted the law, mentioned in the previous chapter, providing equal pay for black soldiers. Charles Sumner pushed a number of other measures to purge racial discrimination from the statute book. At one point, Reverdy Johnson complained that half the Senate’s time was taken up with Sumner’s equal rights proposals. Congress rescinded the prohibition on the employment of blacks to carry the mails (a step Sumner had unsuccessfully proposed in 1862) and allowed testimony by blacks in federal courts and judicial proceedings in the District of Columbia. The Senate also agreed to Sumner’s proposal to bar streetcar companies in the District from excluding black passengers, but the bill died in the House. Lincoln was a passive observer of Sumner’s crusade; the president, Sumner complained, was “not moved to help” on any of these matters when “a word from him…would have saved me much trouble.” But Lincoln signed into law those bills that managed to pass.
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Another harbinger of postwar debates in the spring of 1864 came when Congress considered a bill to create a territorial government for Montana. No blacks were known to reside there, but Radicals insisted that the suffrage not be restricted by race. The nation, complained Senator John P. Hale, was “calling on this colored race to fight for us” yet remained unwilling to confront the “absurd and barbarous prejudice” that denied them one of the basic “privileges of freemen.” But Democrats and conservative Republicans warned of starting down the road to “negro social as well as political equality.” Senator James R. Doolittle pointed out that regulating the suffrage was universally regarded as a “right which belongs to a state,” not to Congress. Moreover, he reminded Republicans, “a presidential canvass” was on the horizon and the party must not saddle itself with advocacy of black suffrage. Doolittle’s argument resonated with many Republicans. The
New York Times
reprinted his speech and the editor, Henry J. Raymond, wrote, “I agree with every word of it.” Raymond found it “amazing” that Radicals were bent on “forcing the country into new contests of negro suffrage and negro rights of all kinds.” In the event, the House adopted the Montana bill with suffrage limited to whites; the Senate removed the racial qualification; the House refused to recede; and its version became law.
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