Ultimately Lincoln revealed his hand regarding the centrality of slavery to the war with his issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet even this, the decisive measure that Lincoln emphasized had been taken not under his normal constitutional powers—which, he had previously insisted, gave him no power over slavery in the states where it existed—but only under wartime necessity, is now derided by progressive pundits and historians. They scornfully point out that Lincoln freed slaves only where he had no power to free them and kept them in captivity in states where he could actually have freed them.
Once again, Lincoln carefully calibrated what he was doing. He sought to weaken the Southern slaves’ attachment to the plantation. He sought to motivate free blacks in the North to offer their services to the Union cause. And he was determined to keep the slave-owning border states in the Union. Had Lincoln freed the slaves in the border states, most if not all of those states would have promptly defected to the Confederate side.
THE EFFECT OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
Yet the Emancipation Proclamation gravely weakened Lincoln’s support among Northern Democrats. These Northern Democrats used the pretext of its promulgation to turn irrevocably against Lincoln. As historian Jennifer Weber writes in her book Copperheads, “Deeply racist Democrats who had supported the war when its only purpose was maintaining the Union jumped to the opposition when the confrontation became an effort to free the slaves.”23
Emancipation, in other words, was the alchemy that turned War Democrats into Peace Democrats. The tone of Democratic opposition can be seen in resolutions passed by Democratic majorities in Indiana and Illinois demanding that Lincoln retract his “wicked, inhuman and unholy” Emancipation Proclamation. The Chicago Times, a Democratic paper, denounced emancipation as “a monstrous usurpation, a criminal wrong, and an act of national suicide.”24
By 1864, the Peace Democrats dominated the Democratic Party. The party nominated a War Democrat, George McClellan, to challenge Lincoln’s reelection bid. But the platform was completely controlled by the Peace Democrats. The Democrats’ very slogan, “The Constitution as It Is, and the Union as It Was,” reflected the Peace Democrats’ insistence that they wanted America to go back to the union as it was prior to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War itself. In sum, they demanded a restoration of slavery.
The Democrats had a good chance to win. The war had dragged on, seemingly interminably, with even Republican stalwart Horace Greeley grieving for “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country,” eager nearly above all else to halt “the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” Once again, in their customary style, the Democrats launched racist attacks against Lincoln, nicknaming him “Abraham Africanus the First” and announcing his Ten Commandments, the first of which was “Thou shalt have no other God but the Negro.”25
Lincoln dourly remarked in 1864 that “there is no proposal offered by any wing of the Democratic Party but that must result in the permanent destruction of the Union.” And here he was referring to the Northern Democrats as a whole, the War Democrats no less than the Peace Democrats. By this point, historian David Herbert Donald tells us, “he gave up on winning the support of the War Democrats, most of whom quietly returned to their allegiance to the Democratic party.”26
For Lincoln, the Northern Democrats no less than the Southern Democrats were dedicated to the dissolution of the nation as a novus ordo seclorum, which is to say as the founders envisioned it. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Democrats nationwide were intent on murdering that America. The murder attempt failed. Lincoln was reelected, and the Union armies finally prevailed in the Civil War. This convinced a man from Maryland, who thought of himself as a Northern Democrat with Southern sympathies, that “our cause [is] almost lost” and “something decisive and great must be done.”27
The man was John Wilkes Booth. Booth finally fulfilled the numerous calls for Lincoln’s assassination that had been ringing in Democratic newspapers, pamphlets and public rhetoric. In the heat of the 1864 campaign, for instance, the La Crosse Wisconsin Democrat, edited by Copperhead Marcus Pomeroy, urged that if Lincoln were reelected, “we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good.”28
Today progressives portray Booth as a deranged lone wolf, but his view that America would be better off with Lincoln dead was shared by other Democrats, both in the North and in the South. Booth merely put their thoughts into action by actually killing the president. The incident that seems to have activated Booth’s conspiracy was a speech by Lincoln endorsing the idea of black suffrage. “That means nigger citizenship,” Booth said, taking the orthodox Democratic position on the subject. “That’s the last speech he will ever make.”29
As he jumped onto the stage in the theater where the assassination took place, Booth shouted out, “Sic semper tyrannis.” Thus be the fate of tyrants. But of course it was a lie in the classic Democratic fashion. The supreme irony is that Booth’s was the cause of tyranny and human bondage. So deluded was Booth that he regarded the right to enslave other humans as a form of liberty worth killing—and in the end dying—for.
Thus we see a Democrat who represented the cause of the plantation, the cause of tyranny, using the mask of anti-tyranny to justify murdering a man who perhaps more nobly embodied the striving for human freedom than any figure in history. And today the Democrats—the party that protected slavery and killed the man who ended it—have the chutzpah to blame the institution’s legacy on the very party that stopped them.
A SQUID-LIKE CLOUD
Now we turn to Reconstruction, a period whose storytelling is dominated by the towering figure of Eric Foner. Foner is a capable historian who nevertheless, as a progressive leftist, does his best to hide Democratic responsibility for resisting Republican Reconstruction. He also attempts to flip the blame for slavery and racism onto the Republican right. Foner wants his readers to think that the plantation was somehow a right-wing institution that was bravely overthrown by an early generation of American progressives.
Earlier we saw how Foner disingenuously portrays the South as “conservative,” even though its leaders were Democrats who advanced a pro-slavery ideology that, far from being conservative, was unique in world history and represented a radical break with the founding. Foner also counts Lincoln as a progressive even though, as we have seen, Lincoln was a self-described conservative who insisted he was merely implementing the shared principles of the founders. Foner is shameless in the way he distorts ideological labels, relying on his peers to recognize his service to the progressive cause and to uphold his distortions, as most indeed do. Even so, as we will see, Foner’s squid-like cloud of ideology sometimes dissipates and a ray of truth breaks through.
Reconstruction wasn’t just about extending rights to blacks. Nor was it just about settling the terms for the readmission of rebel states into the union. While he lived, Lincoln considered this an administrative rather than a constitutional problem, because as far as he was concerned secession was unconstitutional, and therefore the rebel states had never actually left the union. Reconstruction in its broadest sense was about rebuilding the nation in a manner that realized the full vision of the founders. It was about achieving Lincoln’s goal of reconciling the Declaration’s twin propositions, “created equal” and “consent of the governed.”
The Republicans in Congress who drove Reconstruction realized that, perhaps for the first time in history, there was an elected government that supported not merely emancipation from slavery but also full equality of rights and full enfranchisement for blacks. Admittedly this majority would not have existed had Southern Democrats also been represented. By their own choice, however, they had resigned their positions in Congress and thus forfeited their right to have their votes counted.
Reconstruction represented a mortal threat to a Democr
atic Party whose national prospects depended upon an alliance to save the slave plantation. Some Democrats during this period wondered whether the Democrats would now go the way of the Whigs and become extinct. Perhaps the Republican Party would now, in the 1860s, become the sole party in America in the same manner that Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party had been the sole party when the Federalist Party dissolved. Democrats during the Reconstruction period vowed they would not let this happen. One way or another, they would fight Reconstruction and make a last-ditch effort to save the plantation.
The magnificent scope of Republican Reconstruction can be seen in three landmark constitutional amendments: the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment extending equal rights under the law to all citizens; and the Fifteenth Amendment granting blacks the right to vote. These amendments went beyond unbinding the slave and making him a freeman; they also made him a U.S. citizen with the right to cast his ballot and to the full and equal protection of the laws.
These amendments represented the most important moment for American constitutionalism since the Constitution was first drafted and ratified. The entire civil rights movement of the 1960s would be impossible without them. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 relied heavily on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on the Fifteenth Amendment.
Yet progressive historical accounts as well as progressive textbooks say very little about the debate over the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The reason becomes obvious when we break down the partisan vote on those amendments. One might have thought that after the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment would be a fait accompli. One might expect that every Democrat—at least every Northern Democrat represented in Congress—would now vote for it. In fact, only sixteen of eighty Democrats did.
Let’s pause to digest that for a minute. Even in the aftermath of the Civil War, so strong was their attachment to the plantation that an overwhelming majority of Northern Democrats refused to vote to permanently end slavery. Again, we are speaking of Northern Democrats; Southern Democrats who may have been expected to vote against the amendment were not permitted to vote at all. And when the Thirteenth Amendment went to the states for ratification, only Republican states carried by Lincoln voted for it; Democratic states that went for McClellan all voted no.
On the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Democratic Party’s performance was even more disgraceful. Not a single Democrat, either in the House or the Senate, voted for either amendment. To repeat, these were not Southern Democrats who were excluded from voting; these were Northern Democrats so averse to extending equal rights under law or voting rights to blacks that not a single one of them could bring himself to vote for either measure. So the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments can be considered exclusively Republican achievements, since no Democrats contributed to making them part of the Constitution.
Now we see why progressives don’t want people to know about these amendments, despite their obvious importance. They belie the progressive narrative that the Northerners were the good guys and the Southerners the bad guys. They show the Republican Party to be the only friend of blacks in the critical period following the Civil War, and they expose the Democratic Party as the true party of white supremacy, still fighting to hold onto the slave plantation.
Thus Eric Foner conveniently omits the partisan roll-call vote on each one of these amendments. He gives us all kinds of minutiae about Reconstruction but somehow leaves out how the Republicans and Democrats each voted on the crucial issues of whether blacks could no longer be slaves, vote, and enjoy equal rights under the law. Is this omission a mere oversight? Whatever his intention, Foner’s narrative leaves the false impression that Reconstruction was driven by a series of political conflicts between enlightened Northern progressives and wicked Southern conservatives.
Republicans included two other significant measures as part of their Reconstruction. The first was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, significant not merely in that it was America’s first civil rights law, but also in that it invalidated racially discriminatory laws in the North no less than in the South. Thus it represented a powerful Republican blow against white supremacy.
Second, Republicans sought to give freed slaves a start in life by giving them access to education and also ownership of land confiscated from the Confederacy. The Civil War itself supplied a precedent for this; toward the end of the war, Union general William Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, which reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for liberated slaves.
Using this model framework, Republicans through the Freedman’s Bureau attempted America’s first reparations law, colloquially described as “forty acres and a mule.” In its most expansive reading, reparations meant, in the words of Republican senator Charles Sumner, seizing the land of the slave planters and dividing it “among patriot soldiers, poor whites, and freedmen.”30
THE POLITICS OF TERROR
These measures were opposed by Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson. By this time, it will come as no surprise for anyone to learn that Johnson was a Democrat. Lincoln put him on the ticket because he had opposed secession and was a Union man. Lincoln hoped that Johnson might attract Southern unionists to the cause and also help generate bipartisan support for the war. Yet Johnson remained a Democratic loyalist and, once he became president, connived to defeat Republican Reconstruction and restore, as much as possible, the Southern status quo ante.
Democrats at the time loved Johnson and cheered his efforts. Today’s progressive Democrats take the opposite view, publicly distancing themselves from Johnson. They downplay his Democratic affiliation and claim that as a Southerner he always had secret plantation sympathies. This is actually false; as Foner himself tells us, Johnson grew up dirt poor in Tennessee and hated the planter aristocracy. Johnson’s real reason for opposing Reconstruction was that he always had not-so-secret party sympathies. After the war, he spoke openly about attempting to restore the coalition of Northern and Southern Democrats that had ruled the country since the Jackson–Van Buren era in the late 1820s and early 1830s.
Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but fortunately Republicans had a strong enough majority to override his veto. Johnson was more successful in thwarting the Freedman’s Bureau, the Republican mechanism for giving newly freed blacks a fresh start. Through a systematically enforced policy of lax pardons, Johnson restored plantations to their former owners, thus depriving the bureau of land that was available to issue to blacks. Thus ended “forty acres and a mule,” a policy worth trying that was abolished by a Democratic president intent on restoring what he could of the plantation and of the ideology of white supremacy.
In December 1867, Johnson in his annual message to Congress asserted that African Americans possess less “capacity for government than any other race of people.” He added that “no independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices, they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.” Foner admits that Johnson’s diatribe is “probably the most blatantly racist pronouncement ever to appear in an official state paper of an American president.”31
Democrats also struck at the Republicans’ attempts to include blacks in the Southern economy. Republicans sought to do this by protecting the rights of blacks to make contracts and by assuring that they could also exercise their newly won right to vote. The black ballot in particular was a serious threat to the Democratic Party. Starting in 1866, blacks organized themselves into Union leagues throughout the South. They allied with Northern whites who had moved south—the group that Democrats called carpetbaggers—as well as with sympathetic Southern whites—the group that Democrats called scalawags.
In 1867–69, during the constitutional conventions, blacks and whites jointly participated in political deliber
ations for the first time in the nation’s history. During this “golden decade,” approximately two thousand blacks were elected to important political office in the South. There were two black senators, sixteen black Congressmen, and more than six hundred blacks in the state legislatures. In addition, nearly a thousand blacks held various local offices. Many of them were former slaves. Every single one of them was a Republican. In fact, blacks dominated the Republican Party in the South during the Reconstruction era.
Democrats in the South resolved not merely to crush the black Republicans but also to kill in its cradle America’s embryonic experiment in multiracial democracy. This time the Democratic weapon was a deadly and murderous one, the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former slave-trader, Confederate general and delegate to the 1868 Democratic National Convention. Democrats also founded dozens of other domestic terrorist organizations.
For nearly a decade, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, the Klan and similar groups conducted a reign of terror through the South, targeting not only blacks but also white Republicans who had gone south to help educate blacks and help integrate them into the political process. Klansmen murdered black officials, black voters, and also carpetbaggers and scalawags. They hated blacks for being blacks, and Republicans for attempting to treat blacks as human and extend to them the same rights enjoyed by whites.
As David Chalmers writes in his book Hooded Americanism, the Klan’s preferred techniques of political action were shooting, burning and lynching, and these gruesome acts were often conducted with large Democratic crowds in attendance, eating and drinking as they took in torture as a form of entertainment. Traveling through the South, the Republican official Carl Schurz was horrified to see, in one county after another, decomposing corpses suspended from trees or lying in ditches and on roadways.
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