by James Oakes
“The slaves are not coming so rapidly and so numerously to us as I had hoped,” Douglass recalled Lincoln as saying.
The masters had ways to keep news of the proclamation away from the slaves, Douglass pointed out.
“Well,” Lincoln said, “I want you to set about devising some means of making them acquainted with it, and for bringing them into our lines.” Hundreds of Union agents were already at work in the slave South, informing blacks of the Emancipation Proclamation and enlisting men into the Union army. But those agents were white, and though successful, their impact was limited. Lincoln was proposing that Douglass organize a number of black agents who might prove more persuasive in enticing slaves away from their farms and plantations. Douglass, stunned by the realization that abolition was anything but certain and impressed by the depth of Lincoln’s commitment to it, went home and drew up his plan for a cadre of black enticement agents. By then, however, Republican prospects for an electoral victory had brightened considerably.
The Democrats finally held their convention and ended up splitting the difference between competing factions. They nominated a War Democrat on a platform that fell just short of advocating peace at any price. Though expressing support for a restored federal Union, the Democrats decried virtually every measure employed by Republicans to suppress the rebellion—military arrests, loyalty oaths, denial of the people’s “right to bear arms,” and the “open and avowed disregard of State rights.” This implied that the southern states had a right to secede and that a war for the restoration of the Union was unjustified. The Democrats, however, also nominated George McClellan, the prominent Union general who supported peace only on the basis of reunion. McClellan continued to believe, as he always had, that the war should be prosecuted solely for “the preservation of the Union, its Constitution & its laws.” An amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery was an unacceptable departure from that purpose, McClellan believed. “I think the war has been permitted to take a course which unnecessarily embitters the inimical feeling between the two sections,” he wrote shortly after Lincoln was renominated, “& much increases the difficulty of attaining the true objects for which we ought to fight.” The “true objects” were the restoration of the Union on the basis of the Constitution as it is.64
The Democrats were banking on the war weariness of northern voters, many of whom were indeed tired of the war. But they were tired of slavery as well, and they were most emphatically not tired of the Union. As summer turned to fall, war weariness gave way to renewed optimism. Mobile Bay, one of the last major southern ports still in Confederate hands, fell to the Yankees in August. In September, Sherman’s armies finally captured Atlanta, causing Confederate General Joseph Johnston to split his forces in a futile attempt to throw the Yankees off. Instead, Sherman sent one of his own armies, under General George Thomas, to track down those Confederates moving back into Tennessee, while Sherman himself set off on his devastating “march to the sea,” from Atlanta to Savannah. Farther north, General Philip Sheridan rampaged through the Shenandoah Valley, clearing the area of guerillas and stripping it of the produce that would otherwise have gone to feed General Lee’s men, still besieged in Petersburg.65
Democratic appeals to antiwar sentiment and racial animosity fell flat as the Republican war effort seemed to be succeeding. Contrary to what the Democrats were saying, the destruction of slavery seemed to be helping rather than hindering the northern military campaign. Far from arousing racial hatred, the enlistment of black soldiers had proved indispensable to northern victory and had weakened rather than strengthened the hold of racial prejudice. The Democrats had run a campaign of unparalleled racial demagoguery, and voters repudiated it. Lincoln was reelected easily, and Republicans regained many of the seats in the House that they had lost two years earlier. With their support for the Thirteenth Amendment vindicated at the polls, Republicans returned to Washington in December ready to make the final push.
“A KING’S CURE”
The Republican electoral victories in November of 1864 kept the Thirteenth Amendment alive, but they did not ensure its passage or ratification. The Congress that returned to Washington a month later was the same Thirty-Eighth Congress in which House Democrats had thwarted the amendment the previous June. Lincoln freely admitted this in his annual message to Congress on December 6. Although “the present is the same Congress, and nearly the same members,” Lincoln noted, the circumstances were nonetheless different. There had been an “intervening election” that had given the Republicans enough votes to secure passage of the amendment in the next Congress, which was not scheduled to meet for another year. The amendment will pass, Lincoln said, it was “only a question of time . . . [and] may we not agree that the sooner the better?” The voters had spoken. Democrats had campaigned against abolition and they had been repudiated at the polls. “It is the voice of the people now,” Lincoln said.66
Lincoln let it be known that if the Thirty-Eighth Congress failed to pass the amendment, he would call the Thirty-Ninth Congress—with its overwhelming Republican majorities—into special session in July of 1865. But he was unwilling to wait that long. A growing number of Republicans freely admitted that the constitutional amendment was a “civil” rather than a “military” measure, but for many the rationale for altering the Constitution was still tied to the suppression of the rebellion. With each passing week the collapse of the rebellion seemed closer at hand, and with it the military justification for the Thirteenth Amendment grew more tenuous. If Republicans waited until July for the Thirty-Ninth Congress to convene the war would probably be over and though they would have the votes to secure passage of the amendment they would have lost the major justification for it. Rather than risk the wait, the Republicans would try again, beginning in December of 1864, to win a handful of War Democrats over to their side.
Shortly after Congress returned to Washington in December, Representative James Ashley of Ohio reintroduced the amendment into the House. The Democrats, however, remained largely unmoved by either the changing circumstances of the war or the results of the November elections. When the debate opened in January, Republicans invoked their electoral victory as evidence of popular support for the amendment, but few Democrats were impressed. Republicans pointed to the recent abolitions of slavery in Missouri and Maryland as further evidence of the breadth of antislavery sentiment; Democrats pointed to those same results as proof that state abolition remained the only constitutionally reputable means of ending slavery. Republicans continued to argue that the Thirteenth Amendment was necessary to suppress the rebellion; Democrats continued to insist that abolition was an obstacle to peace, and they pointed to evidence, real but misleading, that the Confederates were willing to pursue a negotiated settlement. By the middle of January it was clear to Ashley that he did not have the votes he needed to secure passage and that the debate was not changing anyone’s mind. The votes would have to be gotten by other means, and those means were already in play.67
The 1864 election did shift a few votes from Border States where the supporters of abolition scored important victories. The Missouri elections had taken place against a backdrop of resurgent guerilla war in the western and northern counties. Confederate troops in Arkansas, still led by Sterling Price, fomented the guerillas in an attempt to prepare the ground for a military invasion, but the violence had the opposite effect. When Price invaded in September, loyal Missourians rallied not to the Confederate standard but to Union General William Rosecrans, who organized the various militias to repel the Confederate advance. Shoved all the way to the western border and then southward back into Arkansas, the Confederates suffered a stinging defeat. Leading radicals such as Thomas Fletcher, a candidate for governor, had played a conspicuous role in the military counterattack against the Confederate invasion, and for this they were rewarded at the polls in November. On the same day Lincoln was reelected, Fletcher also won handily. Radicals took control of both houses of the General Assembly, and t
he referendum calling for a constitutional convention to abolish slavery was approved by a margin of twenty-nine thousand votes. In early 1865, just as Congress was taking up the debate on the Thirteenth Amendment, a radical-dominated convention met at the Mercantile Library in St. Louis, and on January 11 a special committee reported an ordinance declaring the immediate, unconditional emancipation of all slaves in Missouri. Back in July of 1864, several congressmen from Missouri and Maryland, voting as representatives of slave states, had opposed the Thirteenth Amendment. By January those states had abolished slavery on their own, and their representatives now voted as representatives of free states in favor of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Lincoln, however, was not willing to take those votes for granted. Shortly after his reelection he embarked on an unusually intense lobbying campaign to secure the support of Border State congressmen for the Thirteenth Amendment. The president was only one participant in this broad lobbying effort. In the preceding months, Congressman Ashley—who had reintroduced the amendment resolution in December and managed the floor fight in January—had written more than one hundred letters urging his fellow Republicans, particularly in Ohio, to promote the amendment in their home states in hopes of increasing the pressure on the few Democrats who might be vulnerable to such appeals. Former postmaster general Montgomery Blair lent a hand as well. But the most important of the lobbying efforts, along with Lincoln’s, were those of his secretary of state, William Seward, who gathered influential politicians and financiers into what came to be known as the Seward Lobby. Where Lincoln’s lobbying efforts focused on the Border States, Seward’s focused on his home state of New York. They did everything lobbyists are known for: twisted arms, promised patronage, and scuttled bills in exchange for votes. There is little question that money for bribes was made available, but no hard evidence that it was ever paid out.68
The lobbyists singled out representatives who had not been reelected in November and therefore had less to lose—and in the end all but two of the Democrats who voted for the Thirteenth Amendment were lame ducks. They also focused on representatives from Border States where slavery had recently been abolished, and in the final vote nineteen Border State congressmen voted yes. The Seward Lobby paid off as well. Six of the sixteen Democratic votes for the amendment came from New York. The previous year the amendment had fallen twelve votes short of the two-thirds required for passage in the House of Representatives. Had the lobbyists corralled enough congressmen to secure passage? Until the final vote was taken, nobody knew for sure.
Ashley scheduled the vote for January 31, and on that day the galleries filled with eager spectators—newly installed Chief Justice Salmon Chase, feminists who a year earlier had organized a massive petition campaign in favor of the amendment, and African Americans anxious for the result, including Frederick Douglass’s son. Half-a-dozen Republicans had been absent when the June vote had been taken; this time every Republican was present and every single one of them voted yea. It was the Democratic votes that would matter, however. Only four Democrats had supported the amendment in the previous session; at least a dozen would be needed this time. With each Democratic vote cast in favor of the amendment the House fell into an uproar as fellow Democrats expressed their vocal disapproval and Republicans and spectators broke into applause. In the final vote—119 in favor, 56 against—fifteen Democrats had voted yes, along with all eighty-six Republicans.69 A shift of three votes would have changed the result. When the final tally was announced, it took a moment for everyone to realize what had happened. Then the House erupted. Republicans threw their hats in the air; spectators wept and danced. Democrats tried to prevent adjournment but to no avail. The chamber emptied in an atmosphere of jubilation.
The next day, in response to a congratulatory serenade outside the White House, Lincoln spoke about the significance of the amendment. He had always said that slavery was the only thing that ever threatened to destroy the Union; the amendment would “remove all causes of disturbance in the future.” He had “never shrunk,” he said, from doing all that he could to eradicate slavery. That was why he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation. “But that proclamation falls far short of what the amendment will be when fully consummated.” There were those who believed the proclamation was not “legally valid.” It freed only those “who came into our lines” but was “inoperative as to those who did not give themselves up.” Nor could the proclamation definitively secure the freedom “of the slaves born hereafter.” But the Thirteenth Amendment does all of this, Lincoln said. It frees all slaves, everywhere, for all future time. It was “a King’s cure for all the evils” that had not been cured by the Emancipation Proclamation.70
“BUT FREEDOM IS NATIONAL”
Across the North and throughout the West legislatures took the King’s cure with remarkable ease. There were thirty-six states in the Union and three-fourths of them—twenty-seven states in total—had to ratify an amendment for it to become part of the Constitution. Here and there Democrats raised the usual objections—that the Thirteenth Amendment was a racial and constitutional nightmare—but to no avail. In several northern states the amendment was adopted unanimously. In New York, after the Senate had approved the amendment easily, Democratic holdouts in the Assembly lined up against it, but it passed by a vote of 72 to 40. That was February 3, only days after Congress had sent the amendment to the states for ratification. By then the legislatures of Illinois, Rhode Island, Michigan, Maryland, and West Virginia had already ratified it. Before the month was out eleven more state legislatures did the same. After this initial burst of support in which seventeen states endorsed the amendment, ratification slowed down but without ever coming to a halt. Two legislatures ratified the amendment in March, two more in April. Connecticut endorsed it on May 4 and New Hampshire on July 1. These twenty-three legislatures, composed overwhelmingly of northern states and loyal slave states that had already abolished slavery, brought the first round of ratification to a close. It would be more than four months before the second round began, composed primarily of western states—Oregon and California—which were delayed by the slow mails, and seceded states coming back into the Union under President Andrew Johnson’s direction. Not until December did the necessary twenty-seven states finally ratify the amendment. This meant that for almost the whole year of 1865, slavery was still legal in most of the southern states.71
Until ratification was secured the two existing antislavery policies—military emancipation and state abolition—remained in operation. Indeed, they were more potent than ever. Since the start of the war slaves had found their way to freedom by a variety of different means with countless individual variations. Between December of 1864 and December of 1865 the emancipation process accelerated dramatically. It began with Sherman’s ferocious march through the Carolinas, where his troops tore up slavery in some of the oldest, wealthiest plantation districts of the South. In January, Missouri, still plagued by a civil war within the Civil War, finally abolished slavery. Shortly thereafter Tennessee did the same, bringing to six the number of states that abolished slavery by the time Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, barely a week short of the fourth anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter.
Across the South many slaveholders took the news of Lee’s surrender as the signal to acknowledge the end of slavery, calling their slaves together to inform them that the Yankees had won and they were now free. But many others said nothing, and throughout the spring and summer of 1865, Yankee soldiers were still going onto farms and plantations across the South emancipating slaves whose masters would not relent. Still other slaveholders were stoic, noting little more than that they were in the process of reconstructing the labor system on their farms because the workers now had to be paid. “Have lost my negro property by universal emancipation,” Everard Green Baker recorded on May 31, 1865, “in common with all the South.” His cotton “was burnt by the Confederates,” but “[m]y negroes are still with me & I can
hire them.” On November 27, Hill Carter noted in his diary, simply, that “Betty, Julia, Nancy, Lucy began work at 25 cts a day.” Augustin L. Taveau of Charleston, South Carolina, was more contemplative than most. “The conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs has convinced me that we were all laboring under a delusion,” he wrote.
I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters. But events and reflection have caused me to change these opinions. . . . If they were content, happy, and attached to their masters why did they desert him in the moment of his need and flock to an enemy whom they did not know; and thus left their, perhaps, really good masters whom they had known from infancy?
In Texas, “Juneteenth” is still celebrated as the day slavery ended, commemorating the announcement on June 19, 1865, by Union General Gordon Granger that “all slaves are free.”72
The last great wave of emancipations came in 1865, in summer and fall, when the new governments organized under President Johnson’s direction began to function. Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated on April 14, and though Johnson’s accession to the presidency would decisively alter the history of Reconstruction, his initial instincts were to continue the antislavery policies of his predecessor. Specifically, Johnson would require the defeated southern states to abolish slavery as a condition for readmission to the Union. By the time Johnson made this clear, the Thirteenth Amendment was working its way through the state legislatures, and though it was likely to be ratified, the new president was taking no chances.
On May 29, Johnson issued a proclamation of amnesty restoring the property, “except as to slaves,” of those rebels who had taken no part in the leadership of the rebellion and who swore an oath of future loyalty to the Union. That same day Johnson appointed a series of provisional governors to organize constitutional conventions in the seceded states and required that those conventions provide the people with “a republican form of government,” which by then had become code among antislavery politicians for governments without slavery. In yet another proclamation issued a few weeks later, on June 13, Johnson affirmed that all congressional statutes and presidential proclamations “abolishing slavery” were “in full force.” His formal guidelines were far less direct about abolition than Lincoln’s had been, but in August he wrote to William Sharkey, the provisional governor of Mississippi, expressing the hope that the state would amend its own constitution “abolishing slavery and denying to all future legislatures the power to legislate that there is property in man.”73