The Fiery Trial (55 page)

In December 1864 Charles Sumner and other Republican leaders held repeated discussions with Lincoln about “the duty of harmony between Congress and the Executive.” Sumner thought they had reached agreement on a plan to recognize the legitimacy of the Louisiana government and at the same time require other Confederate states to accord “all citizens” equality before the law and the right to vote before readmission to the Union. “If this arrangement is carried out,” Sumner remarked, “it will be an immense political act.” Too immense, it turned out, to succeed.
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James Ashley soon introduced in the House of Representatives a Reconstruction bill embodying the arrangement described by Sumner. However, while Lincoln privately assured key legislators that he would use his influence to get Louisiana to enfranchise at least some blacks, he objected to putting black suffrage in the bill. Lincoln still believed that voting rights were a matter for the states, not the federal government, to determine. In an effort to make the bill acceptable to the president, whose standing with Congress had improved significantly because of his triumphal reelection, Ashley revised it to limit the right to vote to loyal whites and blacks who had served in the military. Weeks of debate followed, and the bill went through numerous incarnations. But with some Republicans insisting on black suffrage and others, along with all the Democrats, resisting it, it became “very clear,” Ashley remarked, “that no bill providing for the reorganization of the governments of loyal State governments in the rebel States can pass this Congress.”
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“The president’s Reconstruction policy stands,” declared the
Springfield Republican
. But Congress refused to count Louisiana’s 1864 electoral vote, and on the eve of adjournment a filibuster by Sumner prevented the seating of the senators elected by what he called “the pretended State Government” there. Lincoln, the
Republican
’s Washington correspondent reported, was “indignant” over Sumner’s action. But this did not seem to damage their cordial personal relationship. “Still he respects Mr. Sumner,” the journalist continued, “confers with him, and perhaps fears him.” A few days after the filibuster, Lincoln sent his private carriage to bring Sumner to the inaugural ball.
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When Congress adjourned at the beginning of March 1865, the issue of Reconstruction remained unresolved. With eight months set to elapse before the next Congress convened, Lincoln had a free hand in making and implementing policy. But Radicals preferred the issue to go over to the fall; in the meantime, said Ashley, “I hope the nation may be educated up to our demand for universal suffrage.” As for Lincoln, Sumner believed that while he was “slow in accepting truths…his mind is undergoing change.”
⁷²

Even the abolitionist movement could not agree on the next steps after emancipation. At the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January 1865, Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass spoke “with unusual warmth of manner” of the necessity of keeping Louisiana out of the Union. Otherwise, the rest of the southern states would return with similar laws, and “we should have slavery back again, in spirit if not in form.” In a nation that proclaimed itself an exemplar of democracy, Douglass declared, to deny blacks the right to vote “is to brand us with the stigma of inferiority.” To which William Lloyd Garrison responded that the suffrage was “a conventional right…not to be confused with the natural right” to freedom. Political equality would come, he believed, only with “industrial and educational development.” The
Liberator
embraced the “renovated” Louisiana regime. “O Garrison,” wrote the
Boston Commonwealth
, “this is not abolitionism.” The debate offered a preview of the split in the American Anti-Slavery Society that would take place the following May, when the members rejected Garrison’s proposal to declare victory and dissolve, Phillips replaced him as president, and the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
appeared with a new motto on its masthead: “No Reconstruction without Negro Suffrage.”
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In early 1865 an equally portentous question also appeared on the political horizon: should the federal government distribute land to the emancipated slaves? While the issue had been pressed by a few members of Congress in 1864, it acquired new urgency thanks to General William T. Sherman. Shortly after Lincoln’s reelection, Sherman and his 60,000-man army set out from Atlanta on the celebrated March to the Sea. They arrived in Savannah at the end of December, accompanied by some 20,000 slaves who had abandoned the plantations to follow the army. On January 12, 1865, at the urging of Secretary of War Stanton, who had traveled to Savannah, Sherman met with twenty leaders of the local black community, most of them Baptist and Methodist ministers. The conversation revealed that the black leaders possessed clear conceptions of slavery and freedom. Asked what he understood by slavery, Garrison Frazier, the group’s spokesman, replied that it meant “receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent.” Freedom he defined as “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor,” a definition not unlike Lincoln’s. The best way to accomplish this was “to have land and till it by our own labor.”
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Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, setting aside the Sea Islands and a large swath of land along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia for the exclusive settlement of black families on forty-acre plots. He also offered them broken-down mules the army could no longer use. Here lay the origins of the phrase “Forty Acres and a Mule” that would reverberate throughout the South during Reconstruction. Sherman was no Radical; his aim was not to inaugurate a social revolution but to relieve his army of the burden of caring for black refugees and, in the process, punish Confederate planters. But black families hastened to take advantage of his order. By June some 40,000 freedpeople had been settled on “Sherman land.”
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Warning that the black settlers would become “landed paupers” whose presence would prevent “the energy and industry of the North” from utilizing this valuable land, General John C. Robinson urged Lincoln to overturn it. Although Sherman’s policy went well beyond anything Lincoln had previously envisioned or supported, he took no action one way or the other, whether from deference to the decisions of military commanders in the field or a desire to see how the experiment worked out is impossible to say. Lincoln did, however, continue to monitor free-labor experiments in the South. In February 1865 he met once again with John Eaton and directed him to continue his supervision of the freedpeople in the Mississippi Valley “on the same principle as in the past, making such improvements as experience may suggest.” On March 1, after receiving a report from Thomas Conway, who had tried to make the labor system established by General Banks more equitable, Lincoln praised Conway’s success “in the work of their moral and physical elevation,” noting that wartime experiments were leading to “an earlier and happier consummation than the most sanguine friends of the freedmen could reasonably expect.”
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Sherman’s order left unclear whether his land grants were permanent or temporary. But the idea that the federal government would provide the former slaves with access to land was reinforced when, at the beginning of March, Congress finally approved and Lincoln signed the bill to establish a Bureau of Emancipation, now called the Freedmen’s Bureau. The measure charged the bureau with distributing clothing, food, and fuel to destitute former slaves and overseeing “all subjects” relating to their condition in the South. To avoid the impression of giving preferential treatment to blacks, Congress at the last moment expanded its responsibilities to include white southern refugees as well.

Continuing fears about the former slaves becoming dependent on federal assistance led the lawmakers to limit the bureau’s existence to one year (later extended to 1870). Nonetheless, the bureau represented an enormous expansion of federal authority. During its life it would set up its own courts, establish schools, regulate labor contracts, try to protect former slaves from violence, and in myriad other ways oversee matters traditionally considered local and state concerns. And as suggested by its full title—Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—it was also authorized to divide abandoned and confiscated land into plots for rental to freedmen and loyal white refugees and eventual sale with “such title as the United States can convey,” language that reflected the legal ambiguity surrounding southern land that had come into the government’s possession. Hardly a commitment to widespread land distribution, the Freedmen’s Bureau Act did envision the federal government settling some former slaves on farms of their own. A number of bureau officials soon proceeded to do so. But in the summer of 1865, in one of his early acts as president, Andrew Johnson would order all land in government hands that had not actually been sold, including that distributed by Sherman, returned to its former owners. Ironically, the only freedpeople to whom the federal government in the end guaranteed land were the former slaves of tribes like the Cherokee that had sided with the Confederacy during the war.
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“It seems our fate never to get rid of the Negro question,” Sidney George Fisher, the Philadelphia lawyer and political commentator, observed in his diary. “What shall we do with the Negro?—seems as far from being settled as ever.”
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As the war neared its conclusion, it was apparent that the fate of the emancipated slaves would be the central issue of Lincoln’s second term as president.

“Every Drop of Blood”: The Meaning of the War

O
N
M
ARCH
4, 1865, Lincoln took the oath of office for the second time. The setting itself reflected how much had changed in the past four years. When Lincoln delivered his first inaugural address, the new Capitol dome, which replaced the original wooden one, was only half complete. Now the
Statue of Freedom
crowned the finished edifice, symbolizing the reconstitution of the nation on the basis of universal liberty. For the first time in American history, companies of black soldiers marched in the inaugural parade. According to one estimate, half the audience that heard Lincoln’s address was black, as were many of the visitors who paid their respects at the White House reception that day.
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When Lincoln spoke, the end of the war and of slavery was finally in sight. Early in February, William T. Sherman’s army had marched from Savannah into South Carolina, bringing, as one planter recorded in his journal, the “breath of Emancipation” to the heartland of secessionism. Only days later, Union forces, among them the celebrated Fifty-fourth Massachusetts singing “John Brown’s Body,” occupied Charleston. Meanwhile, Grant tightened his grip on Lee’s army, still besieged at Petersburg, the gateway to Richmond.
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It must have been very tempting for Lincoln to use his inaugural address to review the progress of the war and congratulate himself and the nation on impending victory. Instead, he delivered a speech of almost unbelievable brevity and humility.
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Lincoln began by stating that there was no need for an “extended address” or an elaborate discussion of “the progress of our arms.” He refused to make any prediction as to when the war would end. One week after the inauguration, Senator Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware wrote that he had “slowly and reluctantly” come to understand the war’s “remote causes.”
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He did not delineate them, but in the second inaugural Lincoln did. Slavery, he stated forthrightly, was the reason for the war:

Lincoln, as always, chose his words carefully. Referring to the slaves as one-eighth of the “population” suggested that they were part of the nation, not an exotic, unassimilable element, as he had once viewed them. “Peculiar,” of course, was how southerners themselves had so often described slavery. “Powerful” seemed to evoke Republicans’ prewar rhetoric about the Slave Power. To say that slavery was the cause placed responsibility for the bloodshed on the South. Yet Lincoln added simply, “And the war came,” seemingly avoiding the assignment of blame. But the war, Lincoln continued, had had unanticipated consequences:

The “astounding” outcome, of course, was the destruction of slavery. Countless northern ministers had pointed to this as evidence of divine sanction for the Union war effort. Lincoln took a different approach. Rejecting self-congratulation, he offered a remarkably philosophical reflection on the war’s larger meaning:

Despite having promised not to judge the South, Lincoln did so. For one last time he reiterated his condemnation of slavery as a theft of labor, combining this with the most direct allusion in all his writings to the institution’s physical brutality. Lincoln was reminding the country that the “terrible” violence of the Civil War had been preceded by two and a half centuries of the terrible violence of slavery. Yet Lincoln called it “American slavery,” not southern slavery, his point being that the nation as a whole was guilty of this sin. This may help to explain why he clung so long to the idea of compensated emancipation; in his letter to Albert G. Hodges of 1864 he had alluded to the possibility that the North would have to “pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong.”
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But the second inaugural implicitly shifted the moral equation from what was due to slaveholders to the nation’s obligation to the slaves.

This long paragraph, one of the most remarkable in American letters, echoed the abolitionists’ view of slavery as a national evil deeply embedded in all the institutions of society and of the war itself as a “judgment of the Lord” for this sin. Lincoln’s words, an Illinois newspaper observed, “might claim paternity of Wendell Phillips.” Or, it might have added, Frederick Douglass, who in his great 1852 speech, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro,” had also spoken of “American slavery.” Indeed, the Radical editors of the
Chicago Tribune
pointed out that they had said much the same thing as Lincoln two and a half years earlier in a piece entitled “Justice of the Almighty,” although, they acknowledged, their exposition was not “so admirably condensed” as Lincoln’s. The
Tribune
had referred to the likely destruction of “the sum total of profit that has been derived from slaveholding,” and how “our own sufferings” were “balance[d]” by the “bloodshed and tears” of two centuries of slavery.
⁶

Not for the first time, Lincoln had taken ideas that circulated in antislavery circles and distilled them into something uniquely his own. He was asking the entire nation to confront unblinkingly the legacy of the long history of bondage. What were the requirements of justice in the face of those 250 years of unpaid labor? What was necessary to enable the former slaves, their children, and their descendants to enjoy the pursuit of happiness he had always insisted was their natural right but that had been so long denied to them? Lincoln did not live to provide an answer. But even implicitly raising these questions suggested the magnitude of the task that lay ahead.

After this passage in which Lincoln, like Puritan preachers of old, struggled to understand the causes of God’s anger with his chosen people, the second inaugural closed with the eloquent words for which it is most often remembered:

Lincoln had been thinking a great deal about the process of reconciliation. In the first weeks of 1865, he had urged military commanders and Governor Thomas C. Fletcher to encourage the people of Missouri to abandon their internecine violence and let bygones be bygones rather than seeking vengeance. Neighborhood meetings, Lincoln suggested, should be held where all would agree to forget “whatever they may heretofore have thought, said or done…. Each leaving all others alone, solves the problem.” Fletcher rejected Lincoln’s plea. The promises of rebels, he responded, could never be trusted. Left unresolved in Lincoln’s Missouri initiative and in the second inaugural itself was the tension between mercy to the former slaveowners and justice to the former slaves. Would the pursuit of one inevitably vitiate the other? “Equality before the law,” Charles Sumner insisted, must precede forgiveness. “Then at last will come
reconciliation
, and not before.”
⁷

Frederick Douglass, who was in the audience, called the second inaugural “more like a sermon than a state paper.” In a speech of only 700 words, Lincoln had referred to God or the Almighty eight times and liberally quoted and paraphrased the Bible. “Woe unto the world,” and “let us judge not” are the words of Jesus; “wring their bread” is a rewording of a passage from Genesis; the archaic usage “bond-man” (which Lincoln had never before employed) appears a number of times in Scripture. Lincoln, of course, had long since acquired a deep knowledge of the Bible. And during the war, while he never joined a church, he seems to have undergone a spiritual awakening. Especially after the death of his young son Willie in 1862, Lincoln moved away from his earlier religious skepticism. He began to compose private thoughts on the will of God and its relation to the war. Lincoln had long believed that a remote higher power controlled human destiny. He now concluded that God intervened directly in the world, although in ways men could not always fathom.
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An intensely private man, Lincoln did not readily reveal his religious convictions. “I have often wished that I was a more devout man than I am,” he remarked in 1863 to a group of clerics, hastily adding that nonetheless, “I place my whole reliance in God.” Of course, Lincoln also understood that revealed religion had a powerful claim on the northern public. During the war, he announced days of thanksgiving and fasting and called on Providence for assistance to himself and the country. Yet he managed to see the war as a divine punishment for slavery while avoiding the desire for blame and vengeance. If Lincoln’s second inaugural was a sermon, it was quite different from those that northerners had grown accustomed to hearing during the Civil War.
⁹

After the address, Douglass repaired with some 5,000 other persons to the White House. When he stepped forward to offer congratulations, Lincoln clasped his hand and said, “My dear Sir, I am glad to see you.” Douglass called the speech a “sacred effort.”
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Not every listener was as kind. Particularly harsh was the
New York World
, which printed the speech “with a blush of shame.” It was an “odious libel,” the editors complained, to equate the blood that “trickled from the lacerated backs of the negroes” with the carnage of “the bloodiest war in history.” “The president’s theology,” it added, “smacks as strongly of the dark ages as does Pope Pius’s politics.” But many Republicans also found the speech puzzling. Why, they asked, had Lincoln not promised an end to the war and laid out “some definite line of policy” regarding Reconstruction? A few contemporaries recognized the greatness of the address. Charles Francis Adams Jr., the colonel of a black regiment, wrote to his father, the ambassador in London, “That rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day…. This inaugural strikes me in its grand simplicity and directness as being for all time the historical keynote of this war.” Overall, however, as Lincoln himself recognized, the address was “not immediately popular,” although he remained confident that it would “wear as well—perhaps better than—anything I have produced.” Lincoln thought he knew why people did not like his speech: “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” On one thing everyone agreed: as George Templeton Strong noted in his diary, the second inaugural was “unlike any American state paper of this century.”
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Nine days after the inaugural, after prolonged debate, the Confederate Congress authorized the enlistment of black soldiers in the southern armies. A few days later, Lincoln took note of this act of desperation in remarks to an Indiana regiment in Washington. “I have always thought that all men should be free,” he remarked, but if any deserved to be slaves it was those willing to fight to keep themselves or others in bondage.
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On April 3, 1865, Robert E. Lee’s army finally abandoned Petersburg. The road to Richmond, twenty miles to the north, now lay open. As government officials fled the defenseless city and a fire raged out of control, destroying much of the business district, Union forces led by the all-black Fifth Massachusetts cavalry entered the capital of the Confederacy. Scenes never before witnessed on this continent followed. Blacks thronged the streets, dancing, praying, and singing, “Slavery chain done broke at last.” Garland H. White, the chaplain of a black regiment, was called on to make a speech to a “vast multitude.” He “proclaimed for the first time in that city freedom to all mankind. After which the doors of all the slave pens were thrown open, and thousands came out shouting and praising God, and Father, or Master Abe.”

The next day Lincoln walked the streets of Richmond, accompanied only by a small detachment of sailors. “The colored population,” wrote T. Morris Chester, a black war correspondent for the
Philadelphia Press
, “was wild with excitement.” At every step, Lincoln was besieged by emancipated slaves, who, to his embarrassment, fell on their knees and hailed him as their messiah or pressed forward to kiss his hand. “I know that I am free,” one black woman exclaimed, “for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him.” The city’s white residents remained indoors. Having always considered their slaves loyal and contented, they were stunned by the reception the black population gave to Lincoln and the conquering (or liberating) Union army. Charles Sumner hoped that Lincoln’s reception in Richmond would affect his ideas about Reconstruction. “He saw with his own eyes,” Sumner wrote to Salmon P. Chase, “that the only people
who showed themselves were negroes
…. Never was I more convinced of the utter impossibility of any organization which is not founded on the votes of the negroes.”
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