The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  Old lantern slide image of 1858 debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas

  In the fifth debate, however, Lincoln exposed the fundamental chasm dividing them when he pointed to the moral vacuity at the heart of popular sovereignty. “If you will take [Douglas’s] speeches, and select the short and pointed sentences expressed by him—as his declaration that he ‘don’t care whether slavery is voted up or down’—you will see at once that this is perfectly logical, if you do not admit that slavery is wrong,” Lincoln pointed out. “If you do admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.”

  Douglas branded this a “base insinuation,” claiming that the remark was made during his fight to destroy the Lecompton constitution and promote democracy in Kansas. But Lincoln would not back away. “I object to [popular sovereignty] as a dangerous dalliance for a free people—a sad evidence that, feeling prosperity, we forget right; that liberty, as a principle, we have ceased to revere. I object to it because the fathers of the republic eschewed and rejected it.”

  When the voting took place, the Democrats won a majority in the Illinois Assembly and, under the rules of the time, reelected Douglas as their senator. But the accumulating alienation of the north had found its champion in Lincoln. Other Republicans, William Seward and Salmon Chase for example, opposed slavery earlier and sometimes more confrontationally than Lincoln, but none could match his ability to cut through the moral emptiness that accepted that one eighth of the people in the United States could be legally owned like horses or hounds.

  “If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away,” he told his audience in Cooper Union, New York, in 1859. “If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality—its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension—its enlargement.” And in two sentences, decades of moral ambiguities were swept away.

  When he argued that the Constitution had to be read in the context of the Declaration of Independence, he did so in down-to-earth terms that anyone could understand. “I think the authors of that notable instrument [the Declaration] intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects …They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.” At once the universal significance of the Declaration became apparent, and Chief Justice Taney’s ruling that it was intended to apply only to whites could be seen as simply too narrow an interpretation to be valid.

  Against this, Douglas could only put forward the dry and untested legalism: “I assert that under the Dred Scott decision you cannot maintain slavery a day in a Territory where there is an unwilling people and unfriendly legislation.” It carried no weight with the Republicans, but the southern Democrats were another matter. Unexpectedly deprived of Kansas, they were determined that Dred Scott should be the key to overturning every legal impediment to the extension of slavery.

  “The Supreme Court has decided that we have a right to carry our slaves into the Territories and, necessarily, to have them protected after we get there,” Senator Albert G. Brown of Mississippi declared in 1858. “We have a right of protection for our slave property in the Territories. The Constitution as expounded by the Supreme Court awards it. We demand it, and we mean to have it.”

  When the new session of Congress met, the southern senators voted with the Republicans to remove Douglas from his chairmanship of the Committee on Territories, and with the removal of his power base went his policy.

  In December 1860, Henry Adams went to Washington to be an assistant to William Seward, Lincoln’s intended secretary of state. Ten years had passed since his previous visit, and he was dismayed to find that the capital of the United States still showed no signs of recovery from the collusion between the commissioners and the speculators that had aborted its birth in 1793. “The same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for work rooms, and sloughs for roads,” he wrote. “The Government had an air of social instability and incompleteness that went far to support the right of secession in theory as in fact; but right or wrong, secession was likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from. The Union was a sentiment, but not much more, and in December, 1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly hostile, so far as it made itself felt.”

  The symbolism was unmistakable. Unity had been George Washington’s overriding goal as president, and he had planned his mighty capital in the expectation that it would be achieved. He had relied on self-interest to build it, just as he had relied on self-interest to hold the Union together. But the capital remained half-built, and the Union appeared to be falling apart.

  Secession certainly caused no difficulty to South Carolina. Citing a background of persistent northern antagonism to the southern way of life, shown especially by the refusal of northern states to return fugitive slaves, delegates declared at a specially summoned convention in December 1860 that Lincoln’s election had finally made the original compact between the states impossible to sustain. “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union,” ran the announcement of secession, “and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” As Jefferson had argued in the days when the frontier barely existed, and Calhoun had amplified when Andrew Jackson was at the height of his autocratic power, the declaration asserted that the Union was merely a compact made by the agreement of the states. “The constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation… the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states under the name of the ‘United States of America’ is hereby dissolved.”

  Within the next two months the geographical line had become a frontier as six other states from the deep south joined South Carolina to form the independent Confederate States of America. After the president called out the militia in response to the shelling of Fort Sumter, the CSA was increased by the addition of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The new frontier reached as far north as the Mason-Dixon Line east of the Mississippi, and to the 36-degree-30-minute parallel west of it. The war that followed was in effect a contest about frontiers, and its name depended on which frontier was recognized.

  Since Lincoln never accepted the Confederacy’s claim to independence, the Union frontier created by Gadsden, Polk, Adams, Jefferson, Ellicott, and Washington still held good, and the war was the Civil War. Because the CSA regarded itself as a confederation of sovereign states extending north to the Pennsylvania border, northwest to Iowa’s border, and west to New Mexico, the war was the War Between the States. The difference was not academic.

  When General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the question had to be answered whether the Confederates were American rebels or foreign combatants. True to his Unionist credo, Lincoln saw them as rebels and offered an amnesty to any state in which 10 percent of the voters were prepared to abolish slavery. But the radical Reconstructionists who took power in the Congress after Lincoln’s assassination were more in tune with the CSA’s claim. To them the south was a conquered enemy power. “I may be asked how we would treat the Confederate States of America?” Congressman Thaddeus Stevens demanded in 1867, and provided his own answer. “Just as Congress chooses. They are our property; their citizens are our subjects. Their lives, their liberties are subject to the supreme will of this body.”

  The future treatment of the south would depend on where the frontier ran during the war.
/>   Chapter 11

  The Limits of Freedom

  We were told that we needed Hawaii in order to secure California. What shall we now take in order to secure the Philippines?…We shall need to take China, Japan, and the East Indies, according to the doctrine, in order to ‘secure’ what we have. Of course this means that, on the doctrine, we must take the whole earth in order to be safe on any part of it.

  WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER, “On Empire and the Philippines,” 1898

  In 1867, the Supreme Court was forced to confront one of the more mundane consequences of the war of the frontiers. The case concerned ownership of the $10 million due to Texas under the 1850 Douglas deal for giving up its claims to New Mexico. The whole sum had not yet been paid, and the court had to decide whether a new Texas had come into being when it seceded from the Union, or whether the old state remained in being and thus continued to be the legitimate recipient of the money. To decide the matter, the court had first to unravel the constitutional fuzziness at the heart of the United States of America—was it a compact of separate states or a consolidated nation?

  In his ruling, Taney’s successor as chief justice, Salmon Chase, formerly Lincoln’s treasury secretary, held that the Constitution recognized a state to be made up of three ingredients: “[It] is a political community of free citizens, occupying a territory of defined boundaries, and organized under a government sanctioned and limited by a written constitution, and established by the consent of the governed.” The thirteen original states met those criteria, and as such bound themselves together in the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.” Fourteen years later the preamble to the Constitution showed that the states wanted to take the Articles’ purpose a step further by creating “a more perfect Union.” The states retained many of their sovereign powers, Chase decided, but a perpetual union made more perfect left the constitutional position unmistakable: “[A state’s] admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final.”

  This interpretation cleared up many confusions. It meant that the United States was a consolidated nation; that secession was impossible; that Texas had remained the same state despite its brief rebellion and thus kept its $10 million; and that the frontier of the Confederate States of America had never existed. The ruling had the added authority of reflecting Lincoln’s stated opinion. “I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual,” he said in his inaugural address in 1861. “I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken.”

  Like Washington, Lincoln’s prime goal was always unity, and his strategy one of inclusiveness. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” he told Horace Greeley in 1862. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.” To achieve that end, he did all he could to bring the Confederate states back home “without deciding, or even considering, whether these States have ever been out of the Union.” From 1863 he had proclaimed his readiness to offer an amnesty to the governments of southern states that abolished slavery and took an oath of loyalty to the Union.

  In the last years of his life, however, this policy was met by unyielding hostility from Republicans in Congress determined not to allow former Confederates back into power. The confrontation that he would surely have faced did not occur until after John Wilkes Booth’s pistol promoted Andrew Johnson to the presidency.

  During 1865, conventions in every Confederate state, except Mississippi, withdrew or voided votes for secession, and under federally appointed governors, new legislatures ratified the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. By the end of the year, all except Texas had reestablished their civil governments and nominated delegates to represent them in Washington. The decision whether to readmit them to the Union was then up to Congress.

  With the formal demands met, President Andrew Johnson showed himself ready to restore antebellum relations between Washington and the states by pardoning Confederate leaders. But Congress was less easily satisfied. The new legislatures had all passed “black codes” that effectively prevented black Americans from owning land, restricted their opportunities of employment, and limited their voting rights. “This is a white man’s government,” said the first postbellum governor of South Carolina, “and intended for white men only.” The simmering impatience of Reconstructionists boiled over when one of Georgia’s delegates to Congress turned out to be a former vice president of the Confederate States of America. Determined to see fundamental changes made to the old, aristocratic south, Republicans turned to an alternative strategy that had already been mapped out in a speech in 1865 by Thaddeus Stevens, the senior congressman from Pennsylvania. His proposals became the framework of the policy known as “radical Reconstruction.”

  Stevens’s strategy was based on the source of Stephen Douglas’s power, Article Four of the Constitution, which stated, “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.” This meant that the executive had to take second place, leaving Congress alone to decide whether the Confederate states had seceded, meaning that they were now a defeated enemy outside the Union, or whether they were unsuccessful rebels who were still within the Union. To help his fellow congressmen make up their minds, Stevens referred them to the opinion of Emmerich de Vattel, the supreme authority on international law, that “a civil war breaks the bands of society and government [and] produces in the nation two independent parties, who consider each other as enemies … They stand, therefore, in precisely the same predicament as two nations who engage in contest.”

  Then Stevens pointed his listeners toward South Carolina’s declaration in 1861 that in respect to the federal government “their mutual relations are as foreign States.” His personal conclusion was that “the late Confederate States are out of the Union to all intents and purposes.” Bleak directness was Stevens’s preferred style, and he did not attempt to soften the tone of his verdict on the position of the southern states: “The future condition of the conquered power depends on the will of the conqueror. They must come in as new states or remain as conquered provinces.”

  Thaddeus Stevens

  The influence exercised over his fellow Republicans by the ancient, club-footed Stevens depended partly on his savage tongue and partly on his chairmanship of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, but until his death in 1868 at the age of seventy-five, he dominated the program of radical Reconstruction. In the course of it, the values of the entire United States were redefined. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments— extending citizenship to everyone born within the national frontier, and prohibiting the states from limiting a voter’s rights on the grounds of race or color—were intended to prevent the south from regaining politically what it had lost in war. Their impact was greatest there, but they applied equally to the north, where until the war only five states allowed free black Americans to vote. Thus just as the Revolution had created a momentum for liberty that few had foreseen in 1775, so the Civil War and Reconstruction carried Unionists into guaranteeing an equality of rights that most would have resisted in 1860.

  In a democracy that had restricted freedom to white males and allowed the creation of the largest slave economy in the world, the battle for such an inclusive concept of liberty would not easily be won. But resistance was bound to be exceptionally fierce in the racial and social aristocracy of the south. The war had brought about one further change that meant there could be no escape from the battle.

  When the Constitution was written, and for twenty years afterward, the national frontier had been so faint that northern senators could discuss secession as an escape from economic strains and a southern vice president could counsel secession as a solution to oppressive laws w
ithout any of them being thought disloyal. That Calhoun should have felt able to propose withdrawal in 1830 in protest at the level of federal taxation, and that the CSA’s original states should have voted to separate so soon after Lincoln’s election, both showed the continuing fragility of the old frontier. More than four years of fighting had changed that.

  “Admit the right of the seceding states to break up the Union at pleasure,” an anonymous private in the Seventieth Ohio Infantry had written home in 1863, “and how long will it be before the new confederacies created by the first disruption shall be resolved into still smaller fragments and the continent become a vast theater of civil war, military license, anarchy and despotism? Better settle it at whatever the cost and settle it forever.”

  Whether they had worn gray or blue, none of the survivors could deny that six hundred thousand dead had settled the issue for good. For the first time since the Articles of Confederation had created the United States, the frontier was unbreakable either legally or illegally. Thus Congress confronted the south intent on making it part of a homogeneous nation. This meant imposing upon it a freedom shared by all citizens.

  To the Yankee correspondent of the Atlantic Monthly who toured the south in 1866, there appeared to be “no homogeneity, but everywhere a rigid spirit of caste…the upper classes continually assert their right to rule, and the middle and lower classes have no ability to free themselves. The whole structure of society is full of separating walls.” Its sense of hierarchy pitched southern society into head-on conflict with the second phase of Reconstruction, designed to make everyone equal before the law, including people of color. Half a century later, Edward Thomas, a Georgia cotton planter, still felt outraged by the assumption that men who had been freed from slavery could be allowed to vote and be elected alongside whites.