30. Lincoln to Banks, Nov. 5, 1863, ibid., 1–2.
Convinced by these arguments, Lincoln told the general to "proceed with all possible despatch."31
The radical unionists in New Orleans were dismayed by this decision. They believed that it cut the ground from under their efforts to create a genuine new order in Louisiana. Indeed, that had been part of Banks's purpose, for he considered the Free State General Committee, recently organized by these unionists, too radical. It advocated a limited Negro suffrage, and one of its conventions had seated delegates from the city's free black community. This went farther than most Louisiana whites were willing to go—and for that matter, farther than many northern whites would accept. The rhetoric of revolution abounded at Free State meetings. The leader of the movement, a Philadelphia-born lawyer named Thomas J. Durant who had lived in New Orleans most of his life, rivaled Wendell Phillips in his enthusiasm for the "great principle of equality and fraternity" on which the new order must be founded. "There could be no middle ground in a revolution. It must work a radical change in society; such had been the history of every great revolution." But Banks also professed to be a student of revolutions, and he drew different lessons from the past. "The history of the world shows that Revolutions which are not controlled, and held within reasonable limits, produce counter Revolutions," he wrote to Lincoln. "We are not likely to prove an exception. . . . If the policy proposed [in Louisiana] is . . . too Radical it will bring a Counter Revolution."32
Banks's program split the Free State Committee into radical and moderate factions. Each faction plus the conservative planters nominated candidates for governor and other state offices in the February 22 election. Banks and most federal officials in New Orleans supported the moderates, who won with a vote greater than the combined total of the radicals and conservatives. The number of votes cast in this election amounted to nearly a quarter of the total recorded for the entire state in 1860.
It seemed a triumph for Lincoln's 10 percent policy. Meanwhile in Arkansas a convention of unionists representing half the state's counties adopted a new constitution repudiating secession and abolishing slavery.
31. Banks to Lincoln, Dec. 30, 1863, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; Lincoln to Banks, Jan. 13, 1864, CWL, VII, 123–24.
32. Quotations from Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, 1978), 197, 228; Banks to Lincoln, Dec. 30, 1863, Lincoln Papers.
A vote equal to almost one-quarter of the 1860 total ratified the constitution and elected a state government in March. But this success remained almost unnoticed in the shadow cast by events in Louisiana—and in Tennessee, where quarrels between iron-clad unionists and recanting Confederates delayed action through most of 1864. This problem plus continuing controversy over affairs in Louisiana drove a wedge into the Republican party that threatened a serious split between the president and Congress. Four related issues emerged in this conflict: the fate of slavery; the political role of blacks in reconstruction; the definition of loyalty; and the status of free black labor in the new order. As each issue generated heat in Louisiana, the temperature also rose in Congress where Republican lawmakers sought to frame their own approach to reconstruction.
The doom of slavery was their first concern. As military measures, both Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and Banks's edict declaring slavery "void" in Louisiana would have precarious legal force when the war was over. That was why Louisiana radicals considered a new constitution abolishing slavery a necessary prerequisite to the election of a new state government. Many congressional Republicans also feared a revival of slavery if conservatives should gain control of a reconstructed Louisiana. The best solution for this problem was a national constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. All Republicans including Lincoln united in favor of this in 1864. But the problem persisted. The Senate quickly mustered the necessary two-thirds majority for a Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but Democratic gains in the 1862 congressional elections prevented similar success in the House, where a 93–65 vote for the Amendment on June 15 fell thirteen votes short of success. In an attempt to ensure that emancipation became part of reconstruction, therefore, the Wade-Davis bill33 passed by Congress on July 2 included a provision outlawing slavery in Confederate states as a condition of their return to the Union.
Fears that moderates and conservatives in Louisiana might make a deal to preserve slavery proved groundless. Despite the refusal of many radicals to participate in the election of a convention in March 1864,
33. Named for Benjamin Wade, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, and Henry Winter Davis, chairman of a special House reconstruction committee. Both were radicals. Davis was from Maryland—a significant sign of how the war had revolutionized that border state. On June 24, 1864, a state constitutional convention in Maryland adopted an amendment abolishing slavery, which voters narrowly ratified on October 13.
that body, meeting from April to July, wrote a prohibition of slavery into Louisiana's fundamental law. It also mandated public schools for all children, opened the militia to blacks, and provided equal access to the courts for both races. In the context of Louisiana's previous history, these were indeed revolutionary achievements. Lincoln described the constitution as "excellent . . . better for the poor black man than we have in Illinois."34
But on the matter that would emerge as the central issue of postwar reconstruction, Negro suffrage, the convention balked. A Louisiana moderate probably spoke with accuracy when he said that scarcely one in twenty white men favored suffrage even for literate, cultured Creoles—much less for newly freed field hands. Nevertheless, pressures for enfranchisement of blacks continued to grow. Abolitionists and radicals won converts among congressional Republicans with their argument that it was not only immoral but also fatuous to grant the ballot to former rebels and withhold it from loyal blacks. In January 1864 the "free people of color" in New Orleans drew up a petition asking for the right to vote. This memorial bore the signatures of more than a thousand men. Twenty-seven of them had fought with Andrew Jackson to defend New Orleans against the British in 1815; many others had sons or brothers in the Union army. Two delegates carried the petition to Washington, where radical congressmen praised them and Lincoln welcomed them to the White House. Impressed by their demeanor, the president wrote to the newly elected governor of Louisiana, Michael Hahn, a letter whose diffident wording conveyed a plain directive. When the forthcoming convention took up the question of voter qualifications, said Lincoln, "I barely suggest for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty in the family of freedom." Hahn and Banks got the message. But persuading a convention of Louisiana whites, even unionists who had swallowed emancipation, to confer political equality on blacks was uphill work. The best that the governor and general could do by cajolery, threats, and patronage was to reverse an initial vote for a clause forbidding Negro suffrage and secure instead a clause authorizing the legislature to enfranchise blacks if it saw fit.35
34. CWL, VIII, 107.
35. Lincoln to Hahn, March 13, 1864, CWL, VII, 243. See also McCrary, Lincoln and Reconstruction, 256–63; LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Columbia, S.C., 1981), 92; and Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge, 1984), 36–65.
Unaware of these efforts by Banks and Hahn, several radicals denounced the Louisiana constitution for its "spirit of caste." Regarding Louisiana as "Mr. Lincoln's model of reconstruction . . . which puts all power in the hands of an unchanged white race," a number of congressional Republicans turned against Lincoln's policy in the spring of 1864.36 Yet in the matter of Negro suffrage, Congress could do no better. The initial version of the House reconstruction bill includ
ed a requirement for the registration of "all loyal male citizens." This phrase had become a Republican code for black enfranchisement. But moderates were not ready for such a step, so they modified the bill by adding the word "white." When the measure came to the Senate, Benjamin Wade's Committee on Territories deleted "white." But after counting heads, Wade added it again before passage on July 2 "because, in my judgment, [black suffrage] will sacrifice the bill."37 Some radicals expressed outrage at such a surrender to expediency. "And this is called 'guaranteeing to the States a Republican form of Government,' is it?" said one abolitionist sarcastically, while a radical newspaper in Boston commented that "until Congress has sense enough and decency enough to pass bills without the color qualification, we care not how quickly they are killed."38
The Negro suffrage issue was part of a larger debate over who constituted the "loyal" population of a state for purposes of reconstruction. Radicals considered blacks and unionist whites who had never supported the Confederacy to be the only true loyalists. Some moderates went along with Lincoln in wishing to include whites who repudiated their allegiance to the Confederacy and took an oath of future loyalty to the Union. But the unionism of these "galvanized" rebels was suspect in the eyes of many Republicans, who therefore wanted to enfranchise blacks to ensure a unionist majority. If blacks could not vote, then neither should recanting whites—at least not until the war was won and all danger of their relapse into rebellion was over. Moreover, congressional Republicans considered 10 or even 25 percent of a state's white voters
36. Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom, 104; McCrary, Lincoln and Reconstruction, 271–72.
37. CC, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 3449. See also Belz, Reconstructing the Union, 183, 201–2, 217.
38. Principia, May 12, 1864; Boston Commonwealth, July 15, 1864.
too slender a basis for reconstruction—especially when, as they saw it, that process in Louisiana had been "imposed on the people by military orders under the form of elections." In the words of Henry Winter Davis, chairman of the House reconstruction committee, the new government in New Orleans was a "hermaphrodite government, half military and half republican, representing the alligators and frogs of Louisiana."39
The fourth area of contention concerned the degree of freedom in the free-labor system to replace slavery. "Any provision which may be adopted . . . in relation to the freed people" by new state governments, declared Lincoln in his proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction, "which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for their education, and which may yet be consistent, as a temporary arrangement, with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class, will not be objected to by the national Executive."40 Here in a nutshell was the problem that would preoccupy the South for generations after the war. How "temporary" would this suggested system of apprenticeship turn out to be? What kind of education would freed slaves receive? How long would their status as a "laboring, landless, and homeless class" persist? These were questions that could not be fully resolved until after the war—if then. But they had already emerged in nascent form in the army's administration of contraband affairs in the occupied South.
From Maryland to Louisiana several hundred thousand contrabands came under Union army control during the war. Many of them had uprooted themselves—or had been uprooted—from their homes. The first task was to provide them food and shelter. The army was ill-equipped to function as a welfare agency. Its main task was to fight the rebels; few soldiers wanted to have anything to do with contrabands except perhaps to exploit them or vent their dislike of them. Thousands of blacks huddled in fetid "contraband camps" where disease, exposure, malnutrition, and poor sanitation took an appalling toll that accounted for a large share of the civilian casualties suffered by the South.
A degree of order gradually emerged from this chaos. Northern philanthropy stepped into the breach and sent clothing, medicine, emergency economic aid, and teachers to the contrabands. Supported by the American Missionary Association, the National Freedmen's Relief Association, the New England Freedmen's Aid Society, the Western
39. New York Tribune, Aug. 5, 1864; CG, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., 682.
40. CWL, VII, 55.
Freedmen's Aid Commission, and many other such organizations both religious and secular, hundreds of missionaries and schoolma'ams followed Union armies into the South to bring material aid, spiritual comfort, and the three Rs to freed slaves. Forerunners of a larger invasion that occurred after the war, these emissaries of Yankee culture—most of them women—saw themselves as a peaceful army come to elevate the freedmen and help them accomplish the transition from slavery to a prosperous freedom.
Of predominantly New England heritage and abolitionist conviction, these reformers exerted considerable influence in certain quarters of the Union government. In 1863 they persuaded the War Department to create a Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, whose recommendations eventually led to establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau in the last days of the war. They also managed to secure the appointment of sympathetic army officers to administer freedmen's affairs in several parts of the occupied South—particularly General Rufus Saxton on the South Carolina sea islands and Colonel John Eaton, whom Grant named superintendent of contrabands for the Mississippi Valley in November 1862. By 1863 the army had gotten many of the freedmen out of the contraband camps and put them to work on "home farms" to provide some of their own support. The army also hired many able-bodied freedmen as laborers and recruited others into black regiments, one of whose functions was to protect contraband villages and plantations from raids by rebel guerrillas or harassment by white Union soldiers.
The need of northern and British textile mills for cotton also caused the army to put many freed people to work growing cotton—often on the same plantations where they had done the same work as slaves. Some of these plantations remained in government hands and were administered by "labor superintendents" sent by northern freedmen's aid societies. Others were leased to Yankee entrepreneurs who hoped to make big money raising cotton with free labor. Still others remained in the hands of their owners, who took the oath of allegiance and promised to pay wages to workers who had recently been their slaves. Some land was leased by the freedmen themselves, who farmed it without direct white supervision and in some cases cleared a handsome profit that enabled them subsequently to buy land of their own. The outstanding example of a self-governing black colony occurred at Davis Bend, Mississippi, where former slaves of the Confederate president and his brother leased their plantations (from the Union army, which had seized them) and made good crops.
The quality of supervision of contraband labor by northern superintendents, Yankee lessees, and southern planters ranged from a benign to a brutal paternalism, prefiguring the spectrum of labor relations after the war. Part of the freedmen's wages was often withheld until the end of the season to ensure that they stayed on the job, and most of the rest was deducted for food and shelter. Many contrabands, understandably, could see little difference between this system of "free" labor and the bondage they had endured all their lives. Nowhere was the apparent similarity greater than in occupied Louisiana, where many planters took the oath of allegiance and continued to raise cotton or sugar under regulations issued by General Banks. Because of the national political focus on the reconstruction process in Louisiana, these regulations became another irritant between radical and moderate Republicans and another issue in the controversy between Congress and president. By military fiat Banks fixed the wages for plantation laborers and promised that the army would enforce "just treatment, healthy rations, comfortable clothing, quarters, fuel, medical attendance, and instruction for children." But further regulations ensured that some of these promises were likely to be honored in the breach. A worker could not leave the plantation without a pass and must sign a contract to remain for the entire year with his employer, who could call on provost marshals to enforce "continuous and faithful service, respectful deportment, correct discipli
ne and perfect subordination." This system amounted to a virtual "reestablishment of slavery," charged abolitionists. It "makes the [Emancipation] Proclamation of 1863 a mockery and delusion," said Frederick Douglass. "Any white man," declared the black newspaper in New Orleans, "subjected to such restrictive and humiliating prohibitions, would certainly call himself a slave." If "this is the definition [of freedom] which the administration and people prefer," observed a radical newspaper in Boston, "we have got to go through a longer and severer struggle than ever."41
41. Banks's regulations are printed in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 15, pp. 666–67, and Vol. 34, pt. 2, pp. 227–31; the abolitionist and black responses are quoted from James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 290, 293; and McPherson, The Negro's Civil War (New York, 1965), 129–30. The account in the preceding paragraphs of wartime policies toward the freedmen is based on the author's own research and on a number of studies by other scholars, especially Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes 1861–1865 (New Haven, 1938); Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis, 1964); Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks 1861–1865 (Westport, Conn., 1973); Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New Haven, 1980); C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1976); McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction; and Cox, Lincoln and the Freedmen.
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