The kind of clash Lincoln had with Chase was really little more than a cloakroom dispute, and it paled by comparison with the struggle Lincoln faced when his fellow Republicans openly declared their disagreements with him on substantial questions of war policy. The Thirty-eighth Congress, which had been formed in the painful 1862 elections (and which met for its first session on December 7, 1863), counted 102 Republican Representatives in the House and 36 Republicans in the Senate, which gave them a clear majority over against the 75 Democratic Representatives in the House and 9 Democrats in the Senate. 71Of the Republican senators, seventeen of them formed an especially critical core of radical Republican determination. They expressed themselves time and again in pressing for the swiftest and most extreme solutions to the problems of war policy, including emancipation and black civil rights.
The figurehead of the Senate Radicals was Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, and no one could match Sumner’s eloquence in pleading for an aggressive prosecution of the war, emancipation, and racial equality. While Sumner was a great talker, he had few skills as a practical politician. Far more talented among the Radicals in wielding the political knife was Benjamin Franklin Wade, crude and competent, and the author of the greatest anti-slavery bon mot in the history of the Congress. (In the debates in the 1850s over the extension of the slavery into the territories, one southern senator shed eloquent tears over the Republicans’ refusal to allow him to take his old black mammy to Kansas with him; Wade replied that he had no objection to the senator’s taking his mammy with him to Kansas, only to selling her once he got there.) Sumner and Wade were joined in radicalism by Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and the unfortunate Pomeroy of Kansas, and Wilson, Wade, Sumner, Trumbull, and Chandler all sat together as one phalanx on the right side of the aisle on the floor of the Senate.72
Most of the Radicals were old veterans of the anti-slavery struggle, and many had even longer ties to the old Whig Party; as a result, they were inclined to regard Lincoln as a political novice. “I begin to despair of ever putting down this rebellion through the instrumentality of this administration,” raged Ben Wade; Lincoln’s ideas “could only come of one, born of poor white trash, and educated in a slave state.” While Lincoln hesitated over colonization, compensated emancipation, and the recruitment of black soldiers, the Radical Republicans used the majority they achieved in the Senate after the withdrawal of the Southern senators to lead the way in expelling Democratic senators of dubious loyalty, in abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, in amending the Militia Act to open up recruitment to black soldiers, in repealing the Fugitive Slave Law, in barring the issue of charters to District of Columbia streetcar companies that practiced racial discrimination, and in equalizing pay for the USCT regiments.73 The conventional wisdom about these Radical Republicans sees them as vengeful, ambitious men, eager to use emancipation as a means of subduing the South once and for all to Northern free-labor capitalism. There may be some debate about their lust for vengeance or self-aggrandizement, but it is certainly true enough that they had embraced the protection of Northern industry through high tariffs, the opening of western public lands to homesteaders as a means of avoiding the formation of a propertyless urban proletariat, and the replacement of slavery in the South with free labor. By these means, argued Wade, the Union would “build up a free yeomanry capable of maintaining an independent republican Government forever.”74
“For nearly two generations, the slaveholding class, into whose power the Government early passed, dictated the policy of the nation,” wrote Henry Wilson. It scarcely took the war to convince them that the South was an obstacle to the triumph of Republicanism and needed a root-and-branch re-creation. The Radicals crafted the confiscation bills in 1861 and 1862 and called for the treatment of rebels as traitors whose penalty, “as established by our fathers, was death by the halter.” Their no-compromise attitude and determination to grant the Republican Party a lock on the national government frequently made them impatient with Lincoln’s administration. In 1862 they tried to unseat Seward as secretary of state, and a few obliquely suggested that even Lincoln should resign. 75
Lincoln, by contrast, has been portrayed as a moderate and far-seeing statesman, desiring only to end the war without bitterness. Lincoln, after all, had won the Republican nomination in 1860 precisely on the grounds that he was more of a moderate than Seward or Chase and could win more votes, while his slowness in moving toward emancipation has been interpreted as proof of Lincoln’s distaste for Radicals. Deep in Lincoln’s temperament was a resistance to radical schemes of social change. “In declaring that they would ‘do their duty and leave the consequences to God,’” the abolitionists “merely gave an excuse for taking a course that they were not able to maintain by a fair and full argument. To make this declaration did not show what their duty was.” Sometimes, Lincoln said to his attorney general, the Missourian Edward Bates, these Radical Republicans were “almost fiendish” in their intensity to bully him into agreement with their agenda. “Stevens, Sumner and Wilson, simply haunt me,” Lincoln complained to Missouri senator John B. Henderson. “Wherever I go and whatever way I turn, they are on my trail.”76
But Lincoln shared more ground with Radical thinking on the key issues of abolition and black civil equality than he often admitted, and it is significant that the Radicals also sought and got policy statements from Lincoln for use in directing their legislative campaigns, while he never gave any such to Republican moderates. William Lloyd Garrison broke ranks with Wendell Phillips and other abolitionists and openly supported Lincoln’s reelection. “There is no mistake about it in regard to Mr. Lincoln’s desire to do all that he can see it right and possible for him to do to uproot slavery,” Garrison assured his wife after meeting with Lincoln in the White House in the summer of 1864. Sumner remained a close family friend of the Lincolns all through the war; Lincoln’s strongest political ally in the House of Representatives was Owen Lovejoy, brother of the abolitionist martyr Elijah Lovejoy and one of the most Radical Republicans in Congress. Lovejoy had stood loyally behind Lincoln for being “at heart as strong an anti-slavery man as any of them,” reminding his fellow radicals that Lincoln had to be the president of the whole Union, not just the Radicals’ part of it, and thus was “compelled to feel his way.” When Lovejoy died in 1864 Lincoln paid tribute to him as “my most generous friend” in Congress, and he told Shelby Cullom “that he was one of the best men in Congress.” As much as the Radicals were “bitterly hostile” to him “personally,” and “utterly lawless—the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with,” Lincoln also admitted that “after all their faces are set Zion-wards.” As he told John B. Henderson, “Sumner and Wade and Chandler are right about [abolition]. … We can’t get through this terrible war with slavery existing.” 77
If Lincoln resisted the Radicals, it was not so much because of outright disagreements over ideology, but because he was determined to keep the hands of Congress off his presidential prerogatives (especially as commander in chief) and to prevent the long-term outcomes of the war from backfiring, either through further bankrupting the county through endless conflict or so wrecking the Southern economy that the freed slaves would have nothing to be free for afterward. If the Radicals were impatient with Lincoln, it was not so much because of a difference of principles, but on differences of timing and political tactics, especially where these concerned the military conduct of the war, abolition, and Lincoln’s proposals for reconstructing the Union—although that provided more than enough room for antagonism and headaches.
As early as December 1861 the Radicals tried to deal themselves a piece of Lincoln’s war powers by creating a seven-member House-Senate committee, known as the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, with Wade and Chandler as the unofficial handlers. “I hold it to be our bounden duty… to keep an anxious, watchful eye over all the executive agents who are carrying on the war at the direction of
the people, whom we represent and whom we are bound to protect in relation to this matter,” declared William Pitt Fessenden. Although it was never actually stated in so many words, the joint committee was understood as the Radicals’ lever for pressuring Lincoln and the Union military into waging a more and more Radical version of the war. In February 1862, the committee moved first against Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, a McClellanite general who had botched a small-scale military operation at Ball’s Bluff on the Potomac. It was clear that Stone was a surrogate for McClellan, whom the Radicals had already come to hate as a Democrat and halfhearted. As an object lesson, the committee had Stone arrested and imprisoned for six months without so much as a chance to hear the charges—whatever they were—against him. Nothing bound the committee to observe the customary legal safeguards for those it examined, and the hapless generals and politicians who were haled before the committee were unable to respond to their accusers, or even (like Stone) to see a copy of the charges that had led to their investigation in the first place. Over the course of the war, the joint committee held 272 meetings and issued eight fat volumes of proceedings, including condemnations of the massacre at Sand Creek and the slaughter of the black soldiers at Fort Pillow. 78
Lincoln did not entirely welcome the meddling of the joint committee, and even though Ben Wade offered Lincoln the use of the committee’s services to call the House or the Senate into closed-door sessions on war policy, Lincoln ignored what he rightly saw as an attempt to manipulate his prerogatives as president. But much as Lincoln was careful to guard his own constitutional powers from overeager interference by the joint committee, it is significant that Lincoln never actually attacked the committee, and he made no attempt to intervene on behalf of Stone or any of the other hapless generals the committee summoned for questioning. After all, the simple threat of the committee’s existence was useful for prodding reluctant generals into action. By the same token, the committee members groused to themselves about Lincoln and occasionally used their hearings to air ill-disguised hints about the direction of war policy, but they never actually challenged Lincoln the way they would challenge and then impeach his successor in future years. The committee, and the Radicals for whom it spoke, recognized in Lincoln an ideological equal but not a practical political one, and their constant agitation for more drastic prosecution of the war amounted to an ongoing criticism not of Lincoln’s principles but of what they saw as Lincoln’s imperfect application of them.79
It was not the war but the shape of the Reconstruction that must follow it that became the most serious issue between Lincoln and the Radical Republicans. Acting on his premise that secession was a legal impossibility, Lincoln urged Congress to accept new governments for the Southern states as soon as a Unionist majority among the citizens could make Reconstruction there ready. In March 1862 he appointed Andrew Johnson, a Unionist Democrat and the only Southern senator who had steadfastly refused to resign from the U.S. Senate after his state seceded, as “Military Governor of the State of Tennessee… until the loyal inhabitants of that state shall organize a civil government in conformity with the Constitution of the United States.” Over the next four months, Lincoln appointed Edward Stanly, an old North Carolina Whig, as military governor of the occupied eastern shore of North Carolina, and John Smith Phelps as military governor for Arkansas, both with a similar mandate to restore their states to the Union. In occupied Louisiana, a provisional military government actually managed to have two elected representatives (from the two occupied congressional districts), Benjamin Flanders and Michael Hahn, seated in the House. 80
Then, on December 8, 1863, Lincoln published “A Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” which offered occupied Louisiana a Reconstruction scheme detailing a process for the formation of a new state government. Any inhabitant of Louisiana could obtain a pardon for participating in the rebellion by taking a loyalty oath to the U.S. Constitution and “all acts of Congress passed during the existing rebellion with reference to slaves” and “all proclamations of the President made during the existing rebellion having reference to slaves, so long and so far as not modified or declared void by decision of the Supreme Court.” In other words, with one eye kept firmly on the chance that his actions might be challenged in the federal courts, Lincoln was offering to trade presidential pardons for submission to the Emancipation Proclamation before the Taney Court got a chance to void the Proclamation. The only exclusions Lincoln kept in place would be for high-ranking Confederate military officers, politicians who had resigned federal offices (and who had therefore violated their oath to support the Constitution), and anyone guilty of abusing Federal prisoners, “colored persons or white persons.” Then, when 10 percent of the 1860 voting population had taken the loyalty oath, occupied Louisiana could reestablish its state government, and any provisions in reestablished state governments that would make black freedom permanent and provide for the education of freed slaves “will not be objected to by the national Executive.”81
Lincoln, not knowing how the war might turn out, hoped to use this proclamation as a means of wedging emancipation into the constitutions of as many occupied states as soon as possible. The Radicals, however, criticized this plan as too flimsy and too unrealistic a foundation for genuine Reconstruction, in Louisiana or anywhere else. A number of the Radicals, headed by Wade and Sumner, argued that the seceding states had committed “state suicide” and should now be treated as conquered provinces and made to pass again through the entire process of territorialization before being readmitted to the Union. And when Louisianans attempted to follow Lincoln’s directives and re-create a Louisiana constitution, they unwittingly lent the Radicals a stick to beat them with by endorsing only emancipation and not black voting rights, even for black Louisiana soldiers. Lincoln delicately pointed out this oversight to Michael Hahn, the new Louisiana governor, and pressed Hahn privately to have black voting rights included in the new state constitution. The damage had been done, however, and when representatives from the newly reconstructed Louisiana government showed up in Congress in 1864, the Radicals, led by Sumner, prevented them from being officially recognized.82
Then in July 1864, the Radicals moved to take the initiative on Reconstruction out of Lincoln’s hands altogether. Henry Winter Davis in the House and Ben Wade in the Senate sponsored a bill that, although it stopped short of “territorializing” the seceder states, still upped the ante of Reconstruction far above Lincoln’s levels. Instead of the 10 percent of the 1860 voting population specified in the Lincoln proclamation as the requisite for Reconstruction, the Wade-Davis bill demanded the “enrollment” of all the white male citizens of states where “military resistance… shall have been suppressed” and the extraction of a loyalty oath from “a majority of the persons enrolled in the State.” Once the loyalty of a white majority had been established (and this time no inclusion of black citizens would be permitted, since that would make the readmission process too quick and painless), the “loyal people” of a state could elect a convention and reestablish their state government. However, no one who had served in the Confederate army or held political office under the Confederacy was eligible to vote for a delegate to this convention or be elected as a delegate. Likewise, no matter what the form of state government eventually drawn up by the convention, no one who had ever served in the Confederate military or civil service could vote for, or be elected to, any office. Moreover, all public debts under the Confederate regime were to be repudiated (which meant that those holding Confederate bonds, notes, or currency lost everything they had invested), and “involuntary servitude” was to be “forever prohibited.”83
What this did, in effect, was to lengthen Reconstruction almost indefinitely, since it was difficult to see how half of the present population of any Confederate state could be persuaded to take a loyalty oath to the United States before a long time had passed. Lincoln, who understood perfectly what a shambles the Wade-Davis bill would make of Reconstruction, simply k
illed it by means of a pocket veto. He was not unsympathetic to the Radicals’ determination that reconstructed governments be genuinely loyal to the Constitution, but he was also convinced that they had forgotten that his administration did not have all the time in the world. Emancipation—the goal both he and the Radicals shared—was as yet only a military action, and dignified only by what he could claim as his war powers. While the war was still on and Union occupation forces clearly held the whip handle, emancipation could be forced down Southern throats relatively easily. But let the war end suddenly, or let his administration lose the upcoming election in November to a Democratic peace candidate, and the military justification for emancipation would evaporate at the same moment that the shooting stopped. The military threat behind emancipation would cease to exist, and civil court challenges to the permanent legality of emancipation would immediately flood into the federal courts.
Better to take an imperfect Reconstruction that got emancipation onto the books now than delay Reconstruction so long that a changed political or military climate might make emancipation impossible. Lincoln, in a document issued after Congress adjourned, insisted that he was not “inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration,” and that he was not going to undo the “free State constitutions and government already adopted” in places such as Louisiana. This did not do much to convince either Davis or Wade. On August 5 the two Radicals published a defiant manifesto reminding Lincoln, in terms that Lincoln himself ironically had to acknowledge, that “if he wishes our support, he must confine himself to his Executive duties—to obey and execute, not to make the laws—to suppress by arms armed rebellion, and leave political re-organization to Congress.”84
Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Page 63