Chase hurried to Ohio to campaign hard against Vallandigham. Vallandigham lost, but Chase had, of course, been campaigning for Chase. Again Lincoln seemed to shrug. If Chase actually won the presidency in 1864, he said, “the country will never do worse.” It’s hard to know what he meant—unless he was referring to the country that might exist after the war. For the word “Reconstruction” was on everyone’s lips: Arkansas had already been occupied by Federal troops, Nathaniel Banks was in Texas, and in early December, Sherman seized Knoxville. Lincoln had told Andrew Johnson, whom he’d appointed military governor of Tennessee, that it was time to reorganize a loyal state government there. Mindful as early as the fall of 1863 that there would be a presidential election the following year, Lincoln pointed out to Johnson that “it can not be known who is next to occupy the position I now hold, or what he will do.”
In his annual message to Congress that December, Lincoln again brought up the subject of the future, promising not to “attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation,” as he said, “nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.” Yet there remained a host of worrisome questions: what about slaves in states not technically affected by the proclamation, such as Maryland and Missouri? What about states that had seceded and wanted to be readmitted to the Union; what would be the status of emancipation in those places? And what would happen after the war? Would slavery be abolished once and for all? If so, how?
Lincoln attempted to deal with some of those issues in the document he appended to his address. The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction offered full pardons to ex-Confederates and the restoration of all rights to property (except slaves) to those seeking amnesty, providing they hadn’t been Confederate government officials or high-ranking officers—and as long as they took an oath of allegiance. In that oath, they would have to swear to respect and defend the Constitution and all the laws of the United States, including laws passed during the existing rebellion with reference to slaves and all proclamations of emancipation issued by the president. (That provision circumvented any reversals by the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger Taney still presided.) In addition, if, in any of the former rebel states, at least 10 percent of the voters in the 1860 presidential election took the oath, that state could be recognized by the president. As the historian James McPherson wrote, in effect the amnesty proclamation was “a retail policy of unconditional surrender.”
Lincoln concluded the proclamation of amnesty with characteristic aplomb. He thought it “the best the Executive can suggest,” but, he added, “it must not be understood that no other possible mode would be acceptable.” His door stood ajar.
For a fleeting moment, the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction pleased everyone, or so thought John Hay, who remembered the dour, lordly Charles Sumner, the man who had been beaten senseless by Preston Brooks, beaming with pleasure as he listened. In New York, George Templeton Strong also rejoiced. “President’s message and proclamation of conditional amnesty to the rebels, certain classes excepted, finds very general favor,” he crowed. “Uncle Abe is the most popular man in America today.” Yet the tall man with the regal bearing, the New England abolitionist Wendell Phillips, considered Lincoln’s proposals unwise, unsafe, and unfeasible. The proclamation could easily leave landed Confederates in power and make, as he said, “the negro’s freedom a mere sham.” Yet despite his blunt criticism of the administration, Phillips surmised that Lincoln did not expect the proclamation to be accepted and in fact rather hoped that the president was using it to make Confederates reveal their hand to the Democrats who were campaigning for peace; Jefferson Davis and his ilk wanted an independent Confederacy and had no intention of settling for less. The war must, then, go on, and Phillips very much wanted it to go on.
In that, Phillips had an ally and protégé of sorts in the young, extraordinarily popular orator Anna E. Dickinson, a Quaker from Philadelphia. She was twenty-one years old, she was articulate, she was pretty, and she was possessed of a voice that listeners called musical. With her dark brunette hair arranged around her face in soft, flattering curls, she dressed in a plain gray dress, though sometimes she tied a red ribbon around her neck and wore a black velvet bonnet. When in later years she wore lace collars and gilt buttons, she said her audience demanded it. Perhaps they did; she was able to support herself and her family with her lecture fees, which often totaled $1,000 per appearance.
Dickinson had come to her lucrative vocation as an antislavery and women’s rights activist after she had publicly called General George McClellan a traitor in late 1861 during the time he was being lionized by the press and the public. For such perfidy, she had lost her job at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, but William Lloyd Garrison, who had signed her as a speaker for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, requested that she address 4,000 people in Boston at the Music Hall. Invited to New Hampshire by the Republican State Central Committee, she stumped so long and hard that the bellwether Republican victories at the state polls in 1863—though hardly landslides—were credited to her. When she subsequently campaigned in Connecticut, again Republicans laid their victory at her feet. “The Goliath of the Connecticut Copperheads has been killed not by a stripling but by a Girl,” said Wendell Phillips.
Phillips admired Dickinson, and those who heard her said that she was second only to Phillips, himself a great orator. Born in Boston in 1811 and the son of Boston’s first mayor, Wendell Phillips had long been associated with the abolitionist movement, which he joined after marrying Ann Terry Greene, an heiress who had been active in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Greene was infirm, the victim of rheumatoid arthritis, and Phillips, a graduate of Harvard before he was twenty and then of Harvard Law School, proposed on what he thought was Ann’s deathbed, so passionate were her courage and her convictions. Once married, the couple (when Ann was well) often appeared together at rallies. But not until the 1837 murder of the editor Elijah Lovejoy and the strong stand of John Quincy Adams for the right of petition did Phillips find his own eloquent, extemporaneous, and effective voice. He never lost it.
Slender, modest, graceful, and conversational in his speech, Phillips was not a Garrisonian pacifist, and though he respected Garrison, he had no problem using violence, if need be, to rescue a fugitive slave. “Ask no man to do for you anything that you are not able and willing to do for yourself,” his father had told him. Tirelessly traveling from city to city (he was famous by the 1850s), he was a celebrity with a cause and a gift. (He seldom wrote out his speeches in advance.) His notoriety never went to his head, and he was not, like his friend Charles Sumner, pompous, although he was equally brilliant, impassioned, and well versed in history. Like Sumner, however, he seldom admitted he was wrong. Yet Phillips willingly gave up profession, friends, and social standing, for he regarded himself, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once observed, as a “counterweight to sloth and indifference.” The inscription on his small white calling cards read, “Peace if possible. Justice at any rate. W. P.”
Phillips distrusted Lincoln, but he liked Anna Dickinson, whose main talents were earnestness, seeming fearlessness, and an entertaining and withering sarcasm. Her buoyant youthfulness didn’t hurt either—and partly because of it she could get away with stinging asides about the administration or the president, whom she likened to a slave catcher after he annulled General Hunter’s early emancipation proclamation; that too had helped make her famous. She was not a silent Quaker, but, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton would later recollect, a self-made woman who “carved her way, with her own right hand, to fame and independence”; Wendell Phillips said she was “the young elephant sent forward to try the bridges to see if it were safe for older ones to cross.” The Pennsylvania State Republican Party offered her the huge sum of $1,000 a day to campaign for twelve days and speak to the coal miners, who detested the conscription act and the war. They often came to heckle and hiss and in one cas
e fired a pistol at her, but she pushed on, fulfilling her commitment; the Pennsylvania State Republican Committee, on the other hand, never paid her. In the future, she insisted on written contracts.
Detractors carped that “what you brought away with you was not so much a remembrance of what she had said as it was of the manner in which she had said it,” and later it was rumored that Wendell Phillips was either her lover or wrote her speeches; but such was her undeniable, alarming power: it had to be undermined. In 1886, the novelist Henry James would cast her as Verena Tarrant, the empty-headed and unlikable women’s rights activist in his novel The Bostonians.
Though Dickinson agreed with Phillips that the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction was a sham, around the Christmas holidays, in 1863, she received an extraordinary letter signed by Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, twenty-three senators, and seventy-three representatives, including Thaddeus Stevens, James Garfield, John Sherman, Henry Wilson, and Charles Sumner. They were inviting her to speak to Congress in January. A woman, no less, had been called to the Capitol to talk one evening about black freedom; that would be unusual, to say the least, for it would be the first time a woman had ever addressed Congress. The house was crammed with spectators waiting for what one onlooker called “crazy Jane in a red jacket.”
Ushered forward by Vice President Hamlin, who compared Dickinson to Joan of Arc—evidently not realizing that this standard comparison forecast an unhappy end—she summed up the divisive, hot issues of the day when she argued firmly for equal pay for black soldiers and for universal suffrage. The Lincolns, both the president and his wife, Mary, had softly stolen into the gallery at about eight o’clock, just in time to hear the young woman—a girl, really—criticize the Supreme Court and then the president and his amnesty program. “Let no man prate of compromise,” Dickinson declared. “Defeated by ballots, the South had appealed to bullets. Let it stand by the appeal. There was no arm of compromise long enough to stretch over the sea of blood, and the mound of fallen heroes, to shake hands with their murderers.” Then she surprised her audience with what seemed an about-face when she endorsed a second term for Lincoln. The crowd cheered. Lincoln bowed his head forward on his long neck.
Radical Republicans loved the speech. She supported the president while excoriating him. (Later she withdrew her endorsement of Lincoln and then at the last minute, before the 1864 election, changed her mind again.) She was also unambiguous about the fate of the freedman: burdened with a man’s responsibilities, he should have a man’s rights; in a land of traitors, he should have his share of the traitors’ confiscated estates. A constitutional amendment should guarantee the rights of all slaves, former and newly freed, and shield them from any claims to the contrary.
Only John Quincy Adams had been bold enough to propose a constitutional amendment on abolition. That was in 1839, and it had failed. Lincoln knew this, of course. Perhaps with that in mind, his proclamation implied that the only way to protect emancipation from the courts—and, in particular, from the Supreme Court, which had passed Dred Scott—was with a constitutional amendment. For as a political tactician without peer, he knew that the specter of a hostile, activist court would spur the congressional Radicals to action.
In other words, let Congress take up the cause and place emancipation on the rock-solid ground of an amendment. James Ashley, an Ohio Republican, introduced a House bill in support of an amendment prohibiting slavery, and so had Representative James Wilson of Iowa. More significant still was the joint resolution proposed in the early winter of 1864 by Senator John Henderson of Missouri (formerly a Douglas Democrat): that “slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime, shall not exist in the United States.” The Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by Lyman Trumbull, discussed these measures and another proposed by Charles Sumner, who added the more radical proposal of guaranteeing equal rights under the law for black citizens. War Democrats and conservative Republicans would not hear of it: that dour, damnable Sumner liked to toss apples of discord into Congress, jeered Henry Raymond, the editor of The New York Times; and what could it accomplish anyway, except to show the South that Republicans were squabbling? Raymond didn’t believe that the people wanted or would brook any change to the Constitution.
Racism too had to be reckoned with; it was no abstraction. “Let them be free as the beasts in the fields,” intoned The New Orleans Tribune when speaking of former slaves. When a black officer with the rank of major was thrown off a streetcar in the District of Columbia and Sumner protested, one of his Senate colleagues wanted to know why the major hadn’t been riding in the separate car provided for people of his color in the first place. Senator Henry Wilson immediately backed off. He had certainly never intended to foist “Negro equality” on anyone. And the black abolitionist James McCune Smith noted that even if Congress passed a constitutional amendment forbidding slavery, “the word slavery will, of course be wiped from the statute book, but the ‘ancient relation’ can be just as well maintained by cunningly devised laws.”
So it wasn’t too hard for conservative Republicans, such as Raymond, to find common ground with the War Democrats—including James Gordon Bennett of the rival paper, the New York Herald. Not only did they all oppose any constitutional amendment guaranteeing universal civil rights or anything that smacked of racial equality, they all hated Sumner. Aware that an amendment securing freedom for the slave would be easier to pass than one guaranteeing civil liberties, Trumbull cobbled together several proposals, including Ashley’s and excluding Sumner’s. But as one historian of the Thirteenth Amendment has cogently argued, “By rejecting Sumner’s language”—that of equal rights under the law for black citizens—those Republicans “placed an effective cudgel in the hands of later jurists and legislators who beat down any attempt to broaden the amendment into a extension of civil equality for African Americans.” Or women, for that matter.
THERE WAS ALSO the matter of jurisdiction. Which branch of government should superintend this supposed reconstruction, should it come? Members of the Thirty-eighth Congress felt it to be their prerogative. The executive branch of government had already arrogated too much power to itself, appointing, for instance, military governors in the Union-held sections of Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and South Carolina. Though such appointments might be permissible in time of war, in time of peace, Charles Sumner had explained in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, “if a new government is to be supplied, it should be supplied by Congress rather than by the president, and it should be according to established law rather than according to the mere will of any functionary, to the end that ours may be a government of laws and not of men.”
Sumner also urged Congress to acknowledge that the rebel states could no longer exist as states since they had been “vacated,” as he put it, “ . . . by all local government which we are bound to recognize, so that the way is open to a rightful jurisdiction.” Since the treasonous states were no longer states, they should be considered territories and, as such, subject to congressional control. Moreover, he said, the land owned by former Confederates should be divided among “patriotic soldiers, poor whites, and freedmen,” a redistribution that would prevent the restoration of the planter class—the perfidious Confederates, that is, who had started the war and would want to stay in power.
Anxious that Lincoln’s reelection would make the president’s “manifest tendency toward compromises and temporary expedients of policy” stronger, three Radical congressmen decided that the redoubtable Salmon Chase, not Abraham Lincoln, would best be able to implement their plan for reconstruction. One of them, Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, wasn’t a personable man. He often seemed dogmatic and rubbed even his friends the wrong way. But he combined confidence, intelligence, and oratorical polish with an ability to question his earlier opinions. The son of a slaveholder and formerly a Know-Nothing who thought America should be governed only by bona fide Americans—not naturalized Germans or naturalized Irish�
�he was a loyal Unionist who had voted for John Bell and the Constitutional Union Party in 1860. After Fort Sumter, though, he had supported the recruitment of black soldiers and even emancipation in Maryland; after all, freeing the slaves was a matter that fell under the jurisdiction of the state. And he deeply resented Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus as a usurpation of executive privilege.
Another of the men who thought Salmon Chase the man of the hour was Benjamin Wade. The chair of the powerful (and partisan) Committee on the Conduct of the War, Ben Wade had for a very long time criticized Lincoln as too cautious for prosecuting what Wade called “your rose-water war.” By 1864 he was so furious that he joined forces with Davis and the far less savory character Samuel C. Pomeroy to topple the long-legged president. Formerly an agent of the Emigrant Aid Company in Kansas, Pomeroy, as president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, had failed to acknowledge any conflict of interest when he had been elected senator from Kansas. He’d also been accused of bribing the government agent of the Pottawatomie Indians, and after the war, his name was so synonymous with corruption (called “Pomeroyism”) that in their aptly titled novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner caricatured him as the portly and sleazy Senator Abner Dilworthy, who read his Bible upside down.
Davis, Wade, and Pomeroy (John Hay called them the Jacobin Club) composed a putatively secret circular that urged like-minded folks to dump Lincoln and join in a campaign for Salmon P. Chase as president. Known as the “Pomeroy Circular” because Pomeroy alone had signed it, the document did not stay secret for very long, and when the New York Herald published it, astonished readers at first thought it was a hoax.
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