These differences over reconstruction had been simmering for months, but the division among Republicans became public in October, when Sumner articulated his plan in an unsigned article, “Our Domestic Relations,” published in the influential Atlantic Monthly. Blair, irritated by Sumner’s arguments and further angered because the Radical congressional candidate, Henry Winter Davis, was threatening the Blair family’s hegemony in Maryland, countered in a public address at Rockville, Maryland, on October 3. “The revolutionary schemes of the ultra abolitionists,” he charged, led to the eradication of the constitutional rights of the states and promoted the “amalgamation” of the black and white races. The best policy of reconstruction was to entrust government in the rebellious states to loyal men and then restore each Southern state to “its place in the councils of the nation with all its attributes and rights.” To Sumner’s claim that Congress alone had power to manage reconstruction, Blair replied that the “safe and healing policy of the President” was the proper way to restore the Union.
In the fierce controversy that erupted after Blair’s speech, Lincoln stayed carefully neutral. No doubt he was aware of the speculation, reported by a Washington insider, that Blair’s address had been made “by the authority of the President as a faithful exposition of his views; or... [was] instigated by him with a view to feel the public pulse,” but he neither avowed nor repudiated the ideas of his Postmaster General. He did not join Connecticut Senator James Dixon in praise of Blair’s “words of truth and wisdom” in exposing “Sumner’s heresies,” but he did not endorse Thaddeus Stevens’s denunciation of Blair as “this apostate,” whose address was “much more infamous than any speech yet made by a Copperhead orator.”
The whole argument, Lincoln felt, was “one of mere form and little else.” He was certain that Blair, for all his insistence that the people of the Southern states must control their own destinies, would not agree to admit Jefferson Davis to a seat in Congress as a representative of Mississippi, and he was equally confident that Sumner, once the loyal people of Southern states gained direction of their own affairs, would not exclude their representatives from Congress. Avoiding a theoretical argument over whether control of reconstruction belonged to the President or to Congress, he was confident that there could be “little difference among loyal men” over the practical issue of keeping “the rebellious populations from overwhelming and outvoting the loyal minority.”
In his sickroom the President began working on an annual message to Congress that would avoid both extreme Republican positions. In preparing it he sought the advice of his cabinet, securing statistics on the army from Stanton and suggestions from Chase about details of his reconstruction program. The first half of the message was simply a pasting together of paragraphs submitted by the several heads of departments, summarizing their work during the past twelve months and referring to their longer official reports, which were published separately.
The message showed that it had been composed under difficulty; it was, several newspapers remarked, less “Lincolnian” than his earlier messages, and certainly it missed several opportunities. The President did follow up one of the themes of his Gettysburg address in announcing that “under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life,” but he did not develop the idea of a new birth of freedom. Nor did he point to the significance of the first national day of Thanksgiving, which, at the urging of Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, he had proclaimed for the last Thursday in November. And he failed to note the symbolic significance of the completion of the Capitol building, despite all the strains of war, and to make mention of the placing of Thomas Crawford’s nineteen-foot statue of Armed Liberty atop the lantern of the dome on December 2.
The President also failed to use the occasion to stress the growing importance of blacks in the Union war effort. He did point out that more than 100,000 blacks were now serving in the Union armies, but he did not praise their heroism in battle, as he had earlier done in his letter to Conkling. He did not discuss the exceptionally successful efforts of General Lorenzo Thomas, whom he and Stanton had sent into the Mississippi Valley to raise black troops. Nor did he refer to his growing friendship with the great black leader Frederick Douglass, who was very active in raising Negro troops in the North. In August, Lincoln had welcomed Douglass into the White House and, in response to Douglass’s fears that he was vacillating about the value of Negro troops, assured him, “I think it cannot be shown that when I have once taken a position, I have ever retreated from it.”
Only at the end of the message did Lincoln’s distinctive voice emerge. Announcing a proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction, the President offered “full pardon ... with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves,” to all rebels, excepting high-ranking Confederate officials, who would have to take an oath of future loyalty to the Constitution and pledge to obey acts of Congress and presidential proclamations relating to slavery. In order to encourage the political reorganization of the Southern states, he promised to extend recognition when they reestablished governments supported by as few as one-tenth of their 1860 voters who took the oath of allegiance.
Lincoln defended his proclamation as one in which, “as is believed,... nothing is attempted beyond what is amply justified by the Constitution.” An oath, he explained, was necessary to separate the loyal from the disloyal elements in the South, and he preferred a liberal oath, “which accepts as sound whoever will make a sworn recantation of his former unsoundness.” The requirement that rebels must swear to uphold the legislation and proclamations ending slavery was necessary to prevent any attempt at reenslavement of the newly freed blacks, which would be “a cruel and an astounding breach of faith,” and he went on to pledge, “While I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation.” Recognizing that loyal Union men might disagree on the mechanisms of reconstruction, the President allowed for approaches other than his own: “Saying that reconstruction will be accepted if presented in a specified way, it is not said it will never be accepted in any other way.”
This program for reconstruction outlined in Lincoln’s December 1863 message marked a decided change in his thinking about the future of the Southern states. At the outbreak of the war, believing that secession was the work of a small, conspiratorial minority, he hoped that the Unionist majority in the South would reassert itself, throw out the traitors, and send loyal representatives and senators to Washington. The military governors he had appointed were intended simply to facilitate this process. But as the war wore on, he increasingly came to question whether loyal whites were in the majority in the seceded states. His early hope of preventing the war from degenerating “into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle” faded, and he had felt obliged to strike at the basic social and economic structure of the South by announcing the emancipation of the slaves. Now, late in 1863, he was afraid that the South might follow the very course that he had favored in the first months of the conflict. There was a real possibility that the Confederates, admitting defeat, might claim that they had never been out of the Union—a legal fiction he and his advisers had always stoutly maintained—and send back to Washington the same congressmen who had denounced the Union in 1861. Lincoln dreaded “to see... ‘the disturbing element’ so brought back into the government, as to make probable a renewal of the terrible scenes through which we are now passing.” In order to prevent this possibility, his proclamation of amnesty required much sterner tests of loyalty and an acceptance of emancipation.
Lincoln’s message to Congress may have lacked his usual literary elegance, but it was certainly not wanting in political adroitness. It contained something for everybody. The President seemed to agree with the Conservative Republican position that the war was a rebellion of individual Southerners—not of Southern states—against their governmen
t, and he carefully refrained from discussing whether the rebellious states continued to be states in the Union or reverted to territorial status. (He dropped a passage discussing this issue from the draft of the message.) To Conservatives the message offered the assurance that reconstructed governments in the South would maintain “the name of the State, the boundary, the subdivisions, the constitution, and the general code of laws” as before the war. And, most important, Lincoln gave some hope to extreme Conservatives and War Democrats who doubted the legality of the Emancipation Proclamation by pledging to uphold it only “so long and so far as not modified or declared void by decision of the Supreme Court.”
But there was more in the message for Radical Republicans. They were cheered by Lincoln’s assurance that Southerners must accept emancipation as an essential condition for reconstruction and by his promise that slaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation would never be restored to owners. The requirement that all citizens in the rebellious states must take the loyalty oath before participating in the government erased a distinction between loyal and disloyal Southerners that Radicals had long questioned; all white Southerners, at least for a time, would occupy a legal status lower than that of the citizens of the loyal states. In addition, by saying that the governments in the rebellious states had been “subverted,” Lincoln implied that they had ceased to be fully equal states in a constitutional sense. With its careful balancing of Radical and Conservative proposals, the message was, as the Democratic New York World sourly remarked, “a creditable specimen of political dexterity,” which “trims with marvelous adroitness between the two factions of the Republican party.”
So dexterous was it that when it was read to Congress on December 9 reactions were, as John Hay reported, “something wonderful.” Among the Radicals, Sumner was beaming, Zachariah Chandler, who had recently warned the President that he must take a bold stand, was delighted, and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts said the President had “struck another great blow” for freedom. At the other extreme, Conservative Senator Dixon and War Democrat Reverdy Johnson pronounced the message “highly satisfactory.” With the lions lying down with the lambs, it really seemed to Hay “as if the millennium had come.”
In the country at large, reactions were equally favorable. Of course, a few antiwar Democratic newspapers condemned it. It was, declared the New York Journal of Commerce, a “ukase from the chambers of an autocrat”; the Chicago Times suggested that the severity of the terms for Lincoln’s proposed amnesty demonstrated that the President was either “insane with fanaticism, or a traitor who glories in his country’s shame.” But most other public voices enthusiastically endorsed the President’s plan. Greeley’s Radical New York Tribune declared that no presidential message since George Washington’s had “given such general satisfaction,” while the anti-Radical New York Herald praised the President for repudiating “the abolition plan of Senator Sumner.” Sumner himself spoke of Lincoln’s message “with great gratification,” because it satisfied “his idea of proper reconstruction without insisting on the adoption of his peculiar theories.” On the other hand, the Blairs praised it because it supported the Conservative position and annihilated “Sumners and Chase’s territorial project.” From all over the country the President received letters of praise. Friends were “in jubilee over the Message,” reported a New Yorker; it was “Magnificent,” wrote a Washington resident; “Posterity will regard you as ... the restorer of honor, peace and prosperity to our land,” promised another correspondent; while from Ohio came the report that everybody agreed that Lincoln had “said the right word at the right time.”
Perhaps the strongest words of praise came from the Chicago Tribune, whose editor, Joseph Medill, had often been critical of Lincoln. After the President’s message, Medill felt, “the political future begins to look clear.” To finish off the war and bring about a restoration of the Union required “a clear head, an honest mind, and clean hands.” “Who [is] so fit to carry on what is begun,” asked the Tribune, “as he who has so well conducted us ... thus far?” Looking ahead to the next presidential election, the Tribune editors saw “many worthy men discharging important national trusts” but found only one “in whom the nation more and more confides—Abraham Lincoln.” In his private correspondence Medill was positive that “Old Abe has the inside track so completely that he will be nominated by acclamation when the [Republican] convention meets.”
II
That kind of talk, of course, made the problem of reconstruction a part of the contest for the next presidential race. From time to time during the previous year, there had been talk of reelecting Lincoln in 1864, but for the most part it had been desultory and not particularly fervent. Republican newspaper editors, when the question of a second term was raised, usually combined praise for Lincoln with commendation of other conceivable Republican presidential candidates—Seward, Chase, Banks, Butler, Frémont, and so on. Lincoln tried to think as little as possible about the 1864 election. Nowhere in his letters or his public papers during the first two and a half years of the war did he mention renomination or reelection. When newspapers began to agitate the issue, he remarked testily: “I wish they would stop thrusting that subject of the Presidency into my face. I don’t want to hear anything about it.”
But, for all the burdens of his office, he did desire reelection. As he remarked later, he viewed a second term not as just a personal compliment but as an expression of the people’s belief that he could “better finish a difficult work... than could any one less severely schooled to the task.” By the fall of 1863, when E. B. Washburne asked Lincoln to let some of his confidential friends know his intentions with regard to the next presidential election, he answered with only a minimum of tentativeness: “A second term would be a great honor and a great labor, which together, perhaps I would not decline, if tendered.” By November he was more open, and an Illinois visitor who talked with him in the White House reported, “He will be a candidate again—if his friends so desire—of course.”
There was little that Lincoln could do openly to promote his renomination and reelection. Custom prohibited him from soliciting support, making public statements, or appearing to campaign for office. But as the nominating season approached, he made a point of hosting numerous social activities at the White House. Both the Lincolns were resolved to make the winter of 1863–1864 a brilliant social season, which could only boost the President’s hopes for a second term.
Mary Lincoln willingly cooperated in promoting her husband’s reelection. Her mental and physical health had improved, and she gained greater control over her emotions when she was obliged to contrast her own problems with those of her youngest half sister, Emilie Todd Helm, whose husband, Confederate General Benjamin Hardin Helm, was killed at Chickamauga. Seeking to return from the Deep South to her home in Kentucky, Emilie was passed through the Union lines in December and sought refuge in the White House. The Lincolns tried to keep her visit a secret, because the presence of the widow of a high-ranking Confederate officer in the White House was a potential source of embarrassment, especially since Emilie remained outspoken in her loyalty to the South. Inevitably the news leaked out, and General Daniel Sickles, who had lost a leg in the battle of Gettysburg, told the President, “You should not have that rebel in your house.” Firmly Lincoln responded: “General Sickles, my wife and I are in the habit of choosing our own guests. We do not need from our friends either advice or assistance in the matter.” After a week, with a pass from the President allowing her to cross the army lines, Emilie left for Kentucky.
Inspirited by Emilie’s visit, Mary shed her depressing mourning clothing and appeared at the White House New Year’s Day reception in a purple dress trimmed with black velvet. The President wore a long black coat, which, an English observer noted, “seemed to hang on him.” With more enthusiasm than they had displayed for many months, both the President and his wife greeted the visitors who thronged the White House. At this reception, for the first tim
e in American history, the guests presented to the President included what one newspaper described as “four colored men of genteel exterior, and with the manners of gentlemen.” As each visitor was introduced, the President shook hands and bowed, usually saying only “Good morning, Mr. Jones” or “Mr. Smith, how do you do?” Occasionally he paused to exchange a few words with an old friend. Once when a woman asked whether these receptions were not hard work, he replied, “Oh, no—no.... Of course this is tiresome physically; but I am pretty strong, and it rests me, after all, for here nobody is cross or exacting, and no man asks me for what I can’t give him!”
In addition to receptions, the Lincolns gave a number of dinner parties, to which political friends and possible supporters were invited. Fiercely loyal, Mary wanted to exclude her husband’s rivals, and when Nicolay came up with a guest list for the annual cabinet dinner on January 14, she struck off Chase, his daughter, Kate, and his son-in-law, William Sprague. Nicolay appealed to the President, who ordered the names restored. “There soon arose such a rampage as the [White] House hasn’t seen for a year,” Nicolay reported, and Mary, whom the secretary referred to as “her Satanic Majesty,” announced that she was going to take charge of all the arrangements for the dinner. Finding that she was unable to manage, she summoned Nicolay on the very afternoon of the dinner, apologized to him, and asked his help. “I think,” reported the young secretary smugly, “she has felt happier since she cast out that devil of stubbornness.”
Both Lincolns gave particular attention to Charles Sumner, who had shown a disturbing tendency during the previous summer to oppose the administration’s policies. Lincoln respected Sumner for his knowledge, his sacrifices in the antislavery cause, and his seriousness of purpose, and, as they became better acquainted, found the man behind the cold and haughty senatorial mask. Sumner and Lincoln, Mary said, used to talk and “laugh together like two school boys.” Mary found the handsome bachelor senator equally attractive, and they became fast friends. They wrote each other notes in French, they went for carriage drives, and they lent each other books; he let her read his correspondence from European notables, and she sent him bouquets from the White House conservatory. The senator, Mary recalled later, “was a constant visitor at the W[hite] H[ouse]. both in office and drawing room—he appreciated my noble husband and I learned to converse with him, with more freedom and confidence than any of my other friends.” No doubt a good deal of calculation lay behind the attentions that Sumner received from the White House, for the President realized that the senator was a powerful force in the extreme abolitionist wing of his party.
Lincoln Page 72