Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  A second suggestion that Lincoln made to the Confederate commissioners at Hampton Roads reinforces this view of his intent. Pledging that he would be generous in restoring Southern property seized under the Confiscation Acts, he went on to say, according to Stephens and Hunter, “that he would be willing to be taxed to remunerate the Southern people for their slaves.” He had all along favored compensated emancipation, and he believed that many Northerners were “in favor of an appropriation as high as Four Hundred Millions of Dollars for this purpose.” Seward strongly dissented, showing his impatience by getting up and pacing the floor, exclaiming “that in his opinion the United States had done enough in expending so much money on the war for the abolition of slavery,” but Lincoln said that both sections were responsible: “If it was wrong in the South to hold slaves, it was wrong in the North to carry on the slave trade and sell them to the South.” He “could give no assurance—enter into no stipulation” on this subject, but he told the Confederates that he could mention persons, “whose names would astonish you, who are willing to do this, if the war shall now cease without further expense, and with the abolition of slavery as stated.”

  That this proposal was not a figment of the Confederates’ imagination is attested by the proposal that Lincoln drew up when he returned to Washington, which asked Congress to appropriate $400,000,000 to be distributed to the Southern states in proportion to their slave population. Half would be paid by April 1, if all resistance to the national authority ceased, and the remaining half by July 1, provided that the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. This astonishing document told much of Lincoln’s generosity of spirit and of his understanding of the problems the South faced in making the transition from a slave society to a free society. But it revealed even more his almost desperate sense of urgency to bring the war to a speedy end.

  The President laid his plan before the cabinet at an evening session on February 5, earnestly defending it “as a measure of strict and simple economy.” “How long has this war lasted, and how long do you suppose it will still last?” he asked his advisers. Answering his own question, he told them: “We cannot hope that it will end in less than a hundred days. We are now spending three millions a day, and that will equal the full amount I propose to pay, to say nothing of the lives lost and property destroyed.” But his colleagues were not convinced. Welles thought the President’s wish to conciliate the South was commendable, “but there may be such a thing as so overdoing as to cause a distrust or adverse feeling.” “The Rebels,” he predicted, “would misconstrue it if [the offer was] made,” doubtless taking it as evidence of Northern weakness or war-weariness. Anyway, as Fessenden noted, it was “not advisable” to submit the proposal to Congress now, “because there would probably be no chance of its being adopted before the adjournment.” The cabinet members felt strongly “that the only way to effectually end the war was by force of arms, and that until the war was thus ended no proposition to pay money would come from us.” “You are all against me,” Lincoln said sadly, and he reluctantly gave up his proposal, noting, as he folded the papers away, that they “were drawn up and submitted to the Cabinet and unanimously disapproved by them.”

  V

  All along Lincoln believed that the surest way to undermine the Confederacy was by setting up loyal governments in the Southern states as they fell under the control of the Union armies. His terms for reconstruction were both generous and vague, for he was thinking less of the status of the South after the war than of means to stop the fighting. For this reason he was not greatly troubled when his military commanders failed to follow the letter of the law in setting up new Unionist regimes in the Southern states, nor was he interested in the details of registration and voting requirements. What he wanted was a series of seemingly viable loyal governments in several Southern states that could present a believable alternative to the Confederacy.

  That focus had led to fierce disputes with Radicals in his own party, who were worried about what would happen in the South after the war—about the continuing economic and political power of the Southern planter class, the protection of the civil rights of the freedmen, and the status of black labor in the postwar South. The President was not indifferent to any of these concerns, but he preferred to postpone discussion of such divisive issues until the defeat of the Confederacy. In July these differences between President and Congress had come to a head when the legislators refused to recognize the reconstruction governments he had set up in Louisiana and Arkansas and, instead, insisted on their own program in the Wade-Davis bill, which the President vetoed.

  Now, during the winter of 1864–1865, the President and the Congress faced precisely the same issues—but the outcome was remarkably different. As the Congress assembled, Lincoln let it be known that he would veto any reconstruction bill that did not recognize the free-state government he had been carefully nurturing in Louisiana. Instead of leading to a crisis, his insistence produced a compromise. On December 15, Representative Ashley, who was also in charge of the Thirteenth Amendment, introduced a bill designed to please both Conservatives and Radicals, one that he hoped the Congress would approve and the President sign. It extended congressional recognition to Lincoln’s 10 percent government in Louisiana but required the other Southern states to follow the procedures announced in the ill-fated Wade-Davis bill—namely, that voters must take the “iron-clad” oath that they had never supported the rebellion and that more than 50 percent of the eligible voters must favor any new, reconstructed government. In addition, Ashley’s bill called for Negro suffrage, a provision that Radicals increasingly insisted was the only way to ensure the loyalty of the Southern states.

  Over the next weeks Ashley’s compromise measure underwent intense scrutiny from all parties. For the more extreme Radicals, Charles Sumner accepted the proposal, grumbling about the readmission of Louisiana—“which ought not to be done”—but rejoicing that giving suffrage to blacks in the other Southern states was “an immense political act.” Montgomery Blair and N. P. Banks, both Conservatives, went over the measure with the President, who thought the provision for black jurors and voters “might be objectionable to some.” Agreeing that this clause “would simply throw the Government into the hands of the blacks, as the white people under that arrangement would refuse to vote,” Banks promised that the objectionable juror clause would be removed. Congressmen of various persuasions weighed in with suggestions for change, which ranged from simply admitting Louisiana and Arkansas to insisting that all new Southern state constitutions must guarantee “equality of civil rights before the law... to all persons.”

  Obligingly Ashley amended his bill again and again in the hope of attracting a majority. He even added one remarkable provision that would recognize the existing Confederate governments in the Southern states as legitimate if they submitted to the United States, repudiated the Confederate debt, and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. But no combination worked, and on February 21, Ashley was obliged to give up, conceding that “no bill providing for the reorganization of loyal State government in the rebel States can pass this Congress.”

  The defeat of Ashley’s bill was a major victory for Lincoln. Seven months earlier every Republican in the Senate and all but six Republicans in the House had voted for the Wade-Davis bill, to take the process of reconstruction out of the President’s hands. Only Lincoln’s pocket veto had kept the reconstruction process under the control of the executive branch. Now, in a remarkable turnabout, the Congress failed to adopt any reconstruction legislation. The approaching end of the congressional session left the reconstruction entirely in Lincoln’s hands. Lamenting the change, Henry Winter Davis, the arch-Radical who was now a lame-duck congressman, mourned: “Sir, when I came into Congress ten years ago, this was a Government of law. I have lived to see it a Government of personal will. Congress has dwindled from a power to dictate law and the policy of the Government to a commission to audit accounts and appropriate moneys to enable the Executive to exec
ute his will and not ours.”

  The November elections were principally responsible for the change. It was one thing for Republican congressmen to break with the head of their own party when he appeared to be a failure, whose bid for reelection was doomed to disgraceful defeat. It was quite another to defy a President recently reelected by a huge majority with a clear popular mandate.

  Republicans also found it easier to go along with the President’s wishes on reconstruction because circumstances had changed since the previous summer. While the Congress was debating the proposed Thirteenth Amendment and Ashley’s reconstruction bill, it was also moving, with the President’s blessing, to create the new Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, intended to supervise the transition from slavery to freedom in the South. This Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which gave the federal authorities guardianship over the recently emancipated slaves in order to protect them from exploitation by their former owners, made it easier for Republican congressmen to accept even imperfect reconstruction governments in the South, since they would be shorn of much of their power.

  The adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment provided another incentive for Republicans to recognize the reconstruction regimes Lincoln had established. Before that amendment could go into effect, it had to be ratified by twenty-seven of the thirty-six states. Illinois, as Lincoln proudly reported, began the process on February 1, and the other Northern states were sure to follow promptly. The border states of Maryland, West Virginia, and Missouri had all now abolished slavery, and they were expected to ratify it. But slavery persisted in Delaware and Kentucky, and the outcome in those states was doubtful. Even if they both approved, the votes of two additional states were needed—and those votes could only come from states that had been in the Confederacy. The most likely possibilities were Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. By recognizing the regimes that Lincoln had created in those states, congressmen could ensure the speedy death of slavery throughout the nation.

  Congressmen, then, were in a receptive mood toward presidential reconstruction, and Lincoln, who had had very little to do with earlier congressional deliberations on the subject, now presented his case with great skill and force. He addressed the concerns of Radicals, who were beginning to argue that the only way to protect the rights of African-Americans in the South was to give them the ballot. Lincoln assured William D. Kelley that he, too, now believed in Negro suffrage, at least for the better educated and those who had served in the Union armies, and he showed the Pennsylvania congressman a copy of his letter to Governor Hahn of Louisiana, suggesting limited enfranchisement of blacks. Radical Senator B. Gratz Brown also saw a copy of that letter and quoted from it in urging his Missouri constituents to accept enfranchisement of Negroes as an “imperative necessity admitted on all sides.”

  To present to Congress the more attractive side of the reconstruction government in Louisiana, Lincoln detained N. P. Banks in Washington for six months so that the general, who had once been Speaker of the House of Representatives and still kept up his political contacts in the capital, could lobby in behalf of the regime he had helped to create. The President was also prepared to use brass-knuckle tactics if necessary. When the Radical abolitionists Wendell Phillips and George Luther Stearns tried to organize a protest against recognition of the Louisiana regime, they got nowhere. Congressmen told them, “A.L. has just now all the great offices to give afresh and can[’]t be successfully resisted. He is dictator.”

  This combination of forces was strong enough to enable Lincoln to keep control of the reconstruction process in his own hands—but it was not quite enough to secure congressional approval of his actions. After the failure of Ashley’s reconstruction bill in mid-February, administration supporters moved to secure the admission of Louisiana. Lyman Trumbull, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, took the lead. In the past he had often been a severe, even waspish, critic of the President, but his attitude had remarkably softened since November. He seemed to have experienced what Ben Wade called “the most miraculous conversion that has taken place since St. Paul’s time”; possibly he recalled that his next race for the Senate would occur while Lincoln was still in the White House. At any rate, Trumbull conferred with the President about recognizing the reconstructed government of Louisiana and seating its two recently elected senators. As usual, Lincoln cut through the legal verbiage that surrounded these issues and put the issue plainly: “Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relations with the Union, sooner, by admitting or by rejecting the proposed Senators?”

  A clear majority of the Republicans in the Senate joined Trumbull in following the President’s wishes, but a small group of Radicals resolved to block the move. Joined by Wade, Grimes, and a few other Radicals, Sumner began a filibuster against recognizing Louisiana that often deteriorated into an angry shouting match with the President’s supporters. He blasted “the pretended State government in Louisiana” as “a mere seven-months’ abortion, begotten by the bayonet in criminal conjunction with the spirit of caste, and born before its time, rickety, unformed, unfinished—whose continued existence will be a burden, a reproach, and a wrong.” The Radicals, who opposed the Louisiana regime because it did not give African-Americans the vote, worked in close cooperation with the Senate Democrats, who wanted to deny the suffrage to blacks; they shared only opposition to recognizing Lincoln’s government in Louisiana. Because of pressing business that the Senate had to attend to before adjourning, Trumbull was forced to give way, and the admission of Louisiana was defeated.

  Lincoln was angry with Sumner. “He hopes to succeed in beating the President so as to change this Government from its original form and make it a strong centralized power,” he growled. According to Washington insiders, the cordial personal relations that had existed between the senator and Lincoln were at an end now that Sumner had “kicked the pet scheme of the President down the marble steps of the Senate Chamber.” But Lincoln did not permit a difference over policy to become a personal quarrel; he not only genuinely liked and admired Sumner, but he needed his support in the future. Only a few days after Sumner had talked the Louisiana bill to death, the President invited him to the inaugural ball, where the senator promenaded with Mrs. Lincoln, richly dressed in white moire ornamented with lace, on his arm. The President could afford to be generous because he, like nearly everyone else, was certain that the next Congress would admit Louisiana. As the New York Herald predicted, “This extraordinary railsplitter enters upon his second term the unquestioned master of the situation in reference to American affairs, at home and abroad.”

  VI

  Inauguration Day, March 4, 1865, began wet and windy. It had been raining for several days in Washington, and the streets were a sea of mud at least ten inches deep. During the previous week delegations from all parts of the country had been arriving in the capital, and all the hotels were full, with Willard’s accommodating overflow guests on cots in the hallways and parlors. Despite the abominable weather, a crowd began to gather at the east front of the Capitol before ten o’clock, and by the time the ceremonies began at noon, the spectators were sodden. Women, wearing their long, cumbersome dresses, were in a “most wretched, wretched plight,” Noah Brooks observed; “crinoline was smashed, skirts bedaubed, and moire antique, velvet, laces, and such dry goods were streaked with mud from end to end.”

  First came the swearing in of the Vice President, which took place in the Senate chamber. Andrew Johnson had hoped to remain in Tennessee to witness the installation of a new, loyal state government under a constitution with “the foul blot of Slavery erased from her escutcheon,” but Lincoln and his advisers felt that it was unsafe for him not to be in Washington on March 4. Exhausted from the long trip, unsteady from a recent bout of typhoid fever, Johnson asked for some whiskey to calm his nerves. He was especially sensitive to alcohol, and the drink went to his head. In a long, maudlin speech he boasted of his plebeian origins and reminded the embarrassed members of the Supreme Court,
the cabinet, and even the diplomatic corps—“with all your fine feathers and gewgaws”—that they were but creatures of the people. Lincoln had to sit silently through Johnson’s ramblings, and an observer noted that he “closed his eyes and seemed to retire into himself as though beset by melancholy reflections.” When Johnson finally finished and took the oath, the President leaned over to the parade marshal and whispered, “Do not let Johnson speak outside.”

  Then the presidential party moved onto the platform at the east front of the Capitol. As Lincoln’s tall figure appeared, “cheer upon cheer arose, bands blatted upon the air, and flags waved all over the scene.” After the sergeant-at-arms of the Senate quieted the crowd, the President stepped forward holding a half sheet of foolscap on which his inaugural address was printed in two columns. At just that moment the sun burst through the clouds and flooded the scene with light; Chief Justice Chase saw it as “an auspicious omen of the dispersion of the clouds of war and the restoration of the clear sun light of prosperous peace.”

  In his clear, high-pitched voice that reached even the outer edges of the huge crowd, Lincoln read one of the shortest inaugural addresses in American history (703 words) and also the most memorable. He began by reminding his listeners that at this time there was “less occasion for an extended address” outlining policy than there had been at his first inauguration. During the past four years of war, he noted in a tone of weariness, “public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest.” Consequently he could devote the larger part of his address to an explanation of the origins of the conflict and an examination of its significance.