Translated into practical policy, Lincoln’s approach meant giving authority to local military commanders, who, as the Union armies advanced, would identify and sustain kernels of loyalty, and would prepare the ground for elections to restored governments. Early in 1862 Lincoln appointed “military governors” for those parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee then under federal control. In three cases the experiment yielded little to celebrate, but in Louisiana—where New Orleans fell to the Union in April—the regime of Ben Butler as commander of the city, and George F. Shepley as military governor, promised more. Lincoln thought the state might become a model for others, and partly because of this it attracted the nation’s chief attention throughout wartime discussion of reconstruction.
The presence in New Orleans of an educated and propertied free black population alongside one of the most substantial white Unionist communities in the lower South seemed to offer a viable nucleus from which to build a loyal state government. However, Louisiana loyalists were divided along a conservative-radical fault line, defined by their contrasting intentions over slavery. Needing to hold together this loyalist coalition of pro-slavery planters and antislavery businessmen and workers, Lincoln was reluctant to see any local policy that would frighten off the conservatives, and even after issuing his preliminary emancipation order he continued to offer “peace again under the old terms under the constitution.”88 This, however, would depend on their moving swiftly to holding elections in the Unionist enclave. A December vote in two congressional districts saw the election of two loyalist candidates, Benjamin F. Flanders and Michael Hahn: in the warm afterglow of the final Emancipation Proclamation, congressmen agreed to admit them, suppressing their concerns about Lincoln’s conservatism and his forceful use of executive power. But radical doubts deepened when Nathaniel Banks, replacing Butler, established a harsh “free-labor” regime to control the thousands of ex-slaves whose presence portended economic chaos, social confusion, and a threat to military efficiency. Was this really the meaning of black freedom?
Lincoln let Banks’s contractual labor system stand. But in the battle between Louisiana conservatives, who wanted to organize the state under the prewar constitution, and the free-state men, the president’s instincts and private encouragement favored the progressives. He told Banks in August 1863 that he did not want “to assume direction” of the state’s affairs—local self-government was a better, perhaps the only proper, tool of liberation—but that he “would be glad for her to make a new Constitution recognizing the emancipation proclamation, and adopting emancipation in those parts of the state to which the proclamation does not apply.” Intimating his preference for a gentle evolution out of slavery, he continued: “And while she is at it, I think it would not be objectionable for her to adopt some practical system by which the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.” Lincoln urged Banks to “confer with intelligent and trusty citizens of the state” and prepare the way for a state constitutional convention that would eliminate slavery.89 Only in December did a dismayed Lincoln discover that Banks, preoccupied by military affairs in his vast Department of the Gulf, still had not acted.
By then Lincoln had himself given a lead, setting out clearly for the first time—in his annual message to Congress on December 8—his own statement of policy on national reconstruction. It had been almost a year since his Emancipation Proclamation, and longer still since he had had to recognize that he had seriously overestimated Unionist strength, but he had not previously pushed the logic to the point of declaring a single, overarching, federally sponsored scheme of reconstruction which explicitly demanded an end to slavery. The political and military arguments for caution had been real enough, but so, too, had Lincoln’s constitutional scruples, especially over an “absolutist” assault on slavery in the Louisiana enclave and other “exempted localities” of the proclamation. The complex geometry of reconstruction strategy led Lincoln to describe it as “the greatest question ever presented to practical statesmanship.” But by late 1863 he was ready to broadcast his solution, emboldened by Chattanooga and the fall election results which gave the administration a new and unaccustomed confidence. Sensing that he needed to give an unequivocal lead (“a rallying point”) to free-state forces in Louisiana and elsewhere, and fearing that a sudden Confederate collapse might result in a reunion without emancipation, Lincoln announced a scheme of oath-taking, pardon, and government reorganization in the disloyal South. When as few as 10 percent of the eligible voters in 1860 had taken an oath of future loyalty and pledged to abide by his Emancipation Proclamation and congressional acts about slavery, they could set up a state government, which he would recognize.90
The plan proved a political masterstroke. Lincoln enjoyed the rare treat of being feted, at least in public, by both radicals and conservatives. The latter were pleased that he offered to recognize the prewar boundaries and laws of the disloyal states, slavery excepted; that he acknowledged local control; and that he would tolerate a gradual adjustment to freedom, raising no objections if the new governments passed laws “consistent, as a temporary arrangement” with the freedmen’s “present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class.” For their part, jubilant Republican radicals celebrated the president’s commitment to permanent freedom, his promise to see no slaves freed by the proclamation returned to slavery, his resort to a strict loyalty oath, and his nod toward congressional authority over the admission of members returned by newly reorganized states. An initiative that won the approval not only of Chase, Chandler, and Sumner but also of Blair and Reverdy Johnson was no mean feat. Both Noah Brooks and John Hay reeled in wonderment at the arrival of “the political millennium.”91
Privately, in fact, the radicals harbored doubts about Lincoln’s plan, worrying that the percentage threshold was too low. Their anxieties swelled into full-fledged hostility as they watched Lincoln’s leniency toward Banks’s course in Louisiana. Having firmly told the commander that he was “master” there, Lincoln felt he had to fall in with Banks’s decision to hold elections under the prewar constitution, even though this was neither Lincoln’s original preference nor the wish of the more radical free-state leaders. Fears that pro-slavery forces would secure control proved unfounded, but the convention that followed the victory of the more conservative free-state men produced a constitution too cautious for the radicals locally and in Washington. Critics attacked the reformers’ failure to advance beyond the promise of immediate, uncompensated emancipation and give blacks the political protection of the vote. Lincoln, though, welcomed what he judged a huge step forward, one which gave the freedmen of Louisiana greater civil and educational advantages than the blacks of his own Illinois.
Narrower political concerns during a year of a presidential election sharpened the radicals’ anxiety. Once reconstructed on the Lincoln plan, the reorganized states would be free to send delegates to the Republicans’ nominating convention and be represented in the electoral college. This alarmed those in the party who wanted to ditch Lincoln, for the southern beneficiaries of the Ten Percent Plan would surely lend their support to its author’s bid for renomination.
In February legislators began discussion of a more stringent scheme of reconstruction, one which, in its final form, would assert congressional control of the process; end slavery; put the Confederate states under temporary military rule; impose an ironclad oath of loyalty; make readmission conditional on the allegiance of 50 percent of the voters of 1860; and exclude from government far more Confederate officials than did Lincoln’s plan. Sponsored by Henry Winter Davis and Benjamin F. Wade, the bill won the overwhelming backing of congressional Republicans when it passed on July 2. By then Lincoln had comfortably secured his renomination, but the bill’s supporters included radicals who hoped that they might still, somehow, prevent his reelection. Neither did news from the front do anything to head off the challenge to the
president’s policy. In Virginia, Grant was on the move from early May, aiming finally to crush the Army of Northern Virginia, but during a month’s heavy fighting at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor he bled Lee’s forces at a huge cost to his own, losing sixty thousand men. Meanwhile, William Tecumseh Sherman’s western army made only slow progress in its advance toward Atlanta.
Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill by declining to sign it before Congress adjourned. He was not, he explained, prepared “to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration” or to see “set aside and held for nought” the free-state governments already installed in Arkansas and Louisiana, “thereby repelling and discouraging the loyal citizens” who had set them up. He doubted the “constitutional competency” of Congress to abolish slavery in a state. Still, he added mischievously, he was “fully satisfied with the system for restoration contained in the Bill, as one very proper plan for the loyal people of any State choosing to adopt it.” None, of course, was in the least likely to do so. What Lincoln did not say, but understood well enough, was that the Wade-Davis plan had set an impossibly high threshold in order to prevent restoration before the war’s end; his own approach, instead, was to offer generous terms as a bait to waverers to give up the rebellion.92
Angered by Lincoln’s veto and lacking the sense of humor to cope with his teasing, Wade and Davis responded with an ill-judged and crude “manifesto.” Their fear that Lincoln’s plan would make it far too easy for unrepentant whites to resume their control over the South through mere “shadows of governments” prompted a furious attack on the president as a dictator and a usurper of legislative power. Their bitterness was a mark of the philosophical as well as the political tension between the most convinced radicals and the president. As well as wanting an immediate end to slavery, many of Lincoln’s critics urged full political rights for African-Americans (though the Wade-Davis Bill had made no mention of these). Universal black manhood suffrage, as well as being morally right, would guarantee southern loyalty and a permanent postwar settlement. Lincoln, as ever, favored evolution over abrupt upheaval and took an incrementalist, inclusive approach to social change.
But Lincoln’s veto did not imply any slipping of the policy ratchet, or backsliding from existing commitments. Rather, all the signs are that he was moving to more advanced ground during 1864 and 1865. Throughout the war he had made clear that his intended postwar order was a restored Union dedicated to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. He had made his first public statement of the purposes of war on the eighty-fifth anniversary of the nation’s founding text, in July 1861. The “leading object” of democratic government was “to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” As time passed, it became clear that the postwar order would also be a post-emancipation order, one in which blacks would be entitled to the same opportunities as whites. Lincoln had never doubted that the Declaration embraced African-Americans. Having “sloughed off” the idea of colonization during the middle months of the war, he gave growing attention to the integration of blacks as equals into the reconstructed nation.93
Essential to their postwar opportunity, Lincoln recognized, was access to education. Freedmen had a duty to use the “great boon” of emancipation to improve themselves, “both morally and intellectually,” but he knew, too, that without black public schools there could be no easy or swift self-improvement. In 1862 he had been irked when his military governor in North Carolina, Edward Stanly, had engineered the closure of black schools within Union lines. Subsequently Lincoln made clear, first in Louisiana and then throughout the South, that education for freedmen must be a corollary of emancipation and reconstruction.94
Lincoln also moved, however cautiously, toward the radicals’ terrain of suffrage and economic assistance for African-Americans. The attorney general’s 1862 judgment on black citizenship, sweeping away the negative ruling of the Taney court, left no legal barrier to black voting. Gradually Lincoln, who developed a deep respect for the gallantry and ability of the uniformed blacks, came to see the benefits of involving the freedmen in the guardianship of the postwar South. In March 1864 he privately urged Michael Hahn, recently elected as Louisiana’s first free-state governor, to promote a new constitution that would confer voting rights on “some of the colored people,” both “the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.” They would, he judged, “probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.” However, alert to northern popular racism, to hostility amongst the conservatives of the Union coalition, and to the ambiguity of the Constitution, Lincoln held back from what the radicals wanted, namely the federal imposition of black suffrage on the South as a nonnegotiable condition of reconstruction. (Hahn made Lincoln’s preference known to Louisiana’s constitution-makers, but as a mere wish it lacked political force, and the convention simply left open a possibility of future legislative action.) When in the winter of 1864–65 James Ashley’s reconstruction bill sought to provide for black suffrage and jury service, the president jibbed at “a feature that might be objectionable to some” and “rebound like a boomerang not only on the Republican party, but upon the freedman himself and our common country.” Still, as Lincoln looked ahead, in what turned out to be the last public address of his life, he made clear that he wanted to see at least some blacks receiving the political rights enjoyed by whites. And these blacks included thousands who had recently been no more than illiterate field hands.95
As the war drew to a close, Lincoln signed a bill, first introduced by Sumner, setting up within the War Department a Bureau of Freedmen’s Affairs. In doing so he acknowledged that the government had at least some responsibility for the material needs of millions of ex-slaves. His ideas about the postwar relationship between freed labor and the white employing class remained inchoate and undogmatic. There was no map to mark out the African-Americans’ route from servility to confident negotiation in the labor and property markets. Probably aware of transitional arrangements in the British West Indies, Lincoln thought seriously about some kind of short-term apprenticeship system based on money wages and continuing planter control. However, Banks’s highly regulated regime in Louisiana—where loyal planters’ control over contracted black laborers looked like slavery under another name—did nothing to endear the concept of apprenticeship to the radicals, who instead sought large-scale confiscation of rebels’ lands and their redistribution to the freedmen. Permanent confiscation Lincoln—lawyer and constitutionalist—could not stomach, but he found acceptable a revised Freedmen’s Bureau Bill which established a more limited program of seizure. The bureau would assign and rent abandoned lands to the freedmen for a period of three years, after which the occupants might buy the title. Although the radicals had had to narrow their vision, the outcome still pleased them; and for all his reservations Lincoln was prepared to put his signature to a substantial extension of federal power to meet the pressing human needs of a collapsing Confederacy.
Lincoln’s gradualism served a progressive purpose. His approach to social improvement was that of a political realist who knew that for every radical action there was the real threat of a conservative counterreaction and that thoroughgoing changes could prove self-defeating. Lincoln formulated both his emancipation and his reconstruction policies convinced not only that they were true to the Founders’ values, but that they offered the best means of making progress and maintaining the momentum of change. He remained firmly attached to the new government in Louisiana as a sure guarantor of “perpetual freedom” and as the most available means of bringing the state “into proper practical relations with the Union.” Washington’s support would “ripen it to a complete success,” inspiring both the white loyalists and the blacks. “Grant that [the colored man] desires the elective franchi
se, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps toward it, than by running backward over them? Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it?”96
Radicals, however, white and black, deplored what they saw as Lincoln’s misreading of events. Wittingly or not, he was, they believed, trading black freedom for magnanimity toward rebels. He had entrusted the restored governments in Louisiana and Arkansas to “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” lamented the New Orleans Tribune. “The old spirit of slaveocracy is still alive.” But in fact, with the end of the war, Lincoln’s policy was in flux. Significantly, and to the disappointment of a crowd wanting a rousing speech of triumph, his first address after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox dealt earnestly and almost exclusively with the issue of restoration. He concluded this last address of his life with an emphatic statement that what was right for Louisiana was not necessarily the best course for all. While there were inflexible principles at stake in the general work of restoration, the peculiarities of each southern state meant that an “exclusive, and inflexible plan” of reconstruction would not help. He was, he said (in a passage even more tantalizing for the historian than for those who listened), considering “some new announcement to the people of the South,” and he would not “fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.” Discussion in the cabinet three days later suggested that what Lincoln intended in the short term was the imposition of military control over states still without loyal governments, to be followed by political reorganization under southern Unionists. Far less certain is how his policy would have evolved over time.97
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Page 34