Kenner's difficulties in getting out of the Confederacy foretokened the fate of his mission. The fall of Fort Fisher prevented his departure on a blockade-runner. He had to travel in disguise to New York and take ship from this Yankee port for France. Louis Napoleon as usual refused to act without Britain. So James Mason accompanied Kenner to London, where on March 14 they presented the proposition to Palmerston. Once again the Confederates learned the hard lesson of diplomacy: nothing succeeds like military success. "On the question of recognition," Mason reported to Secretary of State Benjamin, "the British Government had not been satisfied at any period of the war that our independence was achieved beyond peradventure, and did not feel authorized so to declare [now] when the events of a few weeks might prove it a failure. . . . As affairs now stood, our seaports given up, the comparatively unobstructed march of Sherman, etc., rather increased than diminished previous objections."18
II
While the South debated the relationship of slavery to its Cause, the North acted. Lincoln interpreted his re-election as a mandate for passage of the 13th Amendment to end slavery forever. The voters had retired a large number of Democratic congressmen. But until the 38th Congress expired on March 4, 1865, they retained their seats and could block House passage of the Amendment by the necessary two-thirds majority. In the next Congress the Republicans would have a three-quarters House majority and could easily pass it. Lincoln intended to call a special session in March if necessary to do the job. But he preferred to accomplish it sooner, by a bipartisan majority, as a gesture of wartime unity in favor of this measure that Lincoln considered essential to Union victory. "In a great national crisis, like ours," he told Congress in his message of December 6, 1864, "unanimity of action among those seeking a common end is very desirable—almost indispensable." This was
18. Frank Lawrence Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (Chicago, 1931), 550–61; quotation from 560.
an expression of an ideal rather than reality, since most war measures, especially those concerning slavery, had been passed by a strictly Republican vote. For the historic achievement of terminating the institution, however, Lincoln appealed to Democrats to recognize the "will of the majority" as expressed by the election.19
But most Democrats preferred to stand on principle in defense of the past. Even if the war had killed slavery, they refused to help bury it. The party remained officially opposed to the 13th Amendment as "unwise, impolitic, cruel, and unworthy of the support of civilized people." A few Democratic congressmen believed otherwise, however. The party had suffered disaster in the 1864 election, said one, "because we [would] not venture to cut loose from the dead carcass of negro slavery." Another declared that to persist in opposition to the Amendment "will be to simply announce ourselves a set of impracticables no more fit to deal with practical affairs than the old gentleman in Copperfield."20 Encouraged by such sentiments, the Lincoln administration targeted a dozen or so lame-duck Democratic congressmen and subjected them to a barrage of blandishments. Secretary of State Seward oversaw this lobbying effort. Some congressmen were promised government jobs for themselves or relatives; others received administration favors of one sort or another.21
This arm-twisting and log-rolling paid off, though until the House voted on January 31, 1865, no one could predict which way it would go. As a few Democrats early in the roll call voted Aye, Republican faces brightened. Sixteen of the eighty Democrats finally voted for the Amendment; fourteen of them were lame ducks. Eight other Democrats had absented themselves. This enabled the Amendment to pass with two votes to spare, 119 to 56. When the result was announced, Republicans on the floor and spectators in the gallery broke into prolonged—and unprecedented—cheering, while in the streets of Washington cannons boomed a hundred-gun salute. The scene "beggared description,"
19. CWL, VIII, 149.
20. Christopher Dell, Lincoln and the War Democrats (Rutherford, N.J., 1975), 290; Anson Herrick of New York in CG, 38 Cong., 2 Sess., 525—25; Samuel S. Cox quoted in Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (New York, 1977), 183.
21. James G. Randall and Richard N. Current, Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure (New York, 1955), 307–13; La Wanda Cox and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, and Prejudice 1865–1866: Dilemma of Reconstruction America (New York, 1963), 1–30.
wrote a Republican congressman in his diary. "Members joined in the shouting and kept it up for some minutes. Some embraced one another, others wept like children. I have felt, ever since the vote, as if I were in a new country." By acclamation the House voted to adjourn for the rest of the day "in honor of this immortal and sublime event."22
The Thirteenth Amendment sped quickly through Republican state legislatures that were in session; within a week eight states had ratified it and during the next two months another eleven did so. Ratification by five additional northern states was certain as soon as their legislatures met. Of the Union states only those carried by McClellan in the presidential election—New Jersey, Kentucky, and Delaware—held out.23 The "reconstructed" states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee ratified readily. Since the Lincoln administration had fought the war on the theory that states could not secede, it considered ratification by three-quarters of all the states including those in the Confederacy to be necessary. One of the first tasks of reconstruction would be to obtain the ratification of at least three more ex-Confederate states to place the Amendment in the Constitution.
Among the spectators who cheered and wept for joy when the House passed the 13th Amendment were many black people. Their presence was a visible symbol of the revolutionary changes signified by the Amendment, for until 1864 Negroes had not been allowed in congressional galleries. Blacks were also admitted to White House social functions for the first time in 1865, and Lincoln went out of his way to welcome Frederick Douglass to the inaugural reception on March 4. Congress and northern states enacted legislation that began to break down the pattern of second-class citizenship for northern Negroes: admission of black witnesses to federal courts; repeal of an old law that barred blacks from carrying mail; prohibition of segregation on streetcars in the District of Columbia; repeal of black laws in several northern states that had imposed certain kinds of discrimination against Negroes or barred their entry into the state; and steps to submit referendums to the voters of several states to grant the ballot to blacks (none of these referendums passed until 1868).
Perhaps the most dramatic symbol of change occurred on February
22. "George W. Julian's Journal," Indiana Magazine of History, 11 (1915), 327; CG, 38 Cong., 2 Sess., 531.
23. New Jersey ratified the Amendment in 1866 after Republicans gained control of the legislature.
1, the day after House passage of the 13th Amendment. On that day Senator Charles Sumner presented Boston lawyer John Rock for admission to practice before the Supreme Court, and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase swore him in. There was nothing unusual in this except that Rock was a black man, the first Negro accredited to the highest Court which eight years earlier had denied U.S. citizenship to his race. The Court had been virtually reconstructed by Lincoln's appointment of five new justices including Chase. The transition from Roger Taney to Chase as leader of the Court was itself the most sweeping judicial metamorphosis in American history.24
Important questions concerning emancipation and reconstruction were sure to come before this new Court. Two such questions might well grow out of actions taken in the area of freedmen's affairs during the winter of 1864–65. Thousands of contrabands had attached themselves to Sherman's army on its march from Atlanta to the sea. Reports filtered northward of Sherman's indifference to their welfare and ill-treatment of them by some officers and men. To sort out the rumors and problems, Secretary of War Stanton journeyed to Savannah in January for a talk with Sherman and an interview with black leaders, most of them former slaves. Among the questions Stanton asked
these men was how best they could support their families in freedom. "The way we can best take care of ourselves," they answered, "is to have land, and turn in and till it by our labor. . . . We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it, and make it our own."25
Stanton and Sherman thought this a good idea, so the conservative general prepared the most radical field order of the war. Issued January 16, Sherman's "Special Field Orders, No. 15" designated the sea islands and the rich plantation areas bordering rivers for thirty miles inland from Charleston down to Jacksonville for settlement by freedmen. Each head of family could be granted forty acres of land, to which he would be given a "possessory title" until Congress "shall regulate their title."26 This land had of course belonged to slaveholders. Their dispossession of it by Sherman's order, like Lincoln's dispossession of their slaves by
24. In June 1864, Lincoln had finally accepted Chase's third offer to resign from the cabinet. In October, Taney died, and two months later the president appointed Chase chief justice in part as a gesture of conciliation to the radical wing of his party.
25. Liberator, Feb. 24, 1865.
26. O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 47, pt. 2, pp. 60–62.
the Emancipation Proclamation, was a military measure carried out under "war powers." The 13th Amendment confirmed Lincoln's action; it remained to be seen how Court, Congress, and Executive would deal with the consequences of Sherman's Order No. 15. The army did not wait, however. During the next several months General Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist who commanded the Union occupation forces on the South Carolina sea islands, supervised the settlement of 40,000 freed-men on land designated in Sherman's order.
The wartime experience of Union army officers who governed occupied territory, of Treasury agents who had charge of abandoned plantations, and of freedmen's aid societies that sent missionaries and teachers to the freed slaves made clear the need for a government agency to coordinate their efforts. All too often these various groups pulled in different directions—and the freedmen themselves in still another direction. In 1863 Congress first considered legislation to create a Freedmen's Bureau. Disagreement whether this agency should be part of the War or the Treasury Department prevented final enactment of a bill until March 3, 1865. By then Chase was no longer secretary of the treasury, so radical Republicans who had wanted him in charge of the Bureau were now willing to place it in the War Department. The function of the Bureau (formally called the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) would be to dispense rations and relief to the hundreds of thousands of white as well as black refugees uprooted by the war and to assist the freedmen during the difficult transition from slavery to freedom. Congress also gave the Bureau control of "abandoned" land with the provision that individual freedmen "shall be assigned not more than forty acres" of such land at rental for three years and an option to buy at the end of that time with "such title thereto as the United States can convey."27 Here was Sherman's Order No. 15 writ large. Whether Congress would be able to convey any title was a troublesome question, given the constitutional ban on bills of attainder and the presidential power of pardon and restoration of property. In any event, the Freedmen's Bureau represented an unprecedented extension of the federal government into matters of social welfare and labor relations—to meet unprecedented problems produced by the emancipation of four million slaves and the building of a new society on the ashes of the old.
The success or failure of the Freedmen's Bureau would be partly determined
27. U. S. Statutes at Large, XIII, 507–9.
by the political terms of reconstruction. This matter occupied much of Congress's time during the winter of 1864–65. Prospects seemed good for a compromise with the president. The afterglow of a Republican electoral sweep had dissolved the bitterness that had crested with Lincoln's pocket veto of the Wade-Davis bill. Chase's elevation to the Court was another step toward rapprochement between Lincoln and radical Republicans. The president's reference to reconstruction in his message to Congress on December 6 hinted at the likelihood of "more rigorous measures than heretofore."28 This willingness to meet Congress halfway set the stage for an attempt to enact a new reconstruction bill. The outlines of such legislation soon emerged in negotiations between Lincoln and congressional leaders: Congress would accept the already reconstructed regimes of Louisiana and Arkansas (soon to be joined by Tennessee) in return for a presidential promise to sign legislation similar to the Wade-Davis bill for the other Confederate states.
As first introduced in the House this new bill enfranchised "all male citizens"—including blacks. Lincoln persuaded the committee chairman in charge of the bill to modify it to limit this provision to black soldiers. During the next two months the measure went through a bewildering series of revisions and amendments in committee and on the House floor. At one stage it enfranchised literate blacks as well as soldiers; at another it removed racial qualifications altogether; at still another it applied these provisions to Louisiana and Arkansas as well as to the other states. Democrats voted with moderate Republicans to defeat the more radical versions of the bill and joined radicals to defeat the more conservative versions. Consequently no bill could be passed. Not wishing to create a precedent for Executive reconstruction by seating Louisiana's senators and representatives in Congress, radicals teamed with Democrats to deny them admission. Thus the 38th Congress expired without any further action on reconstruction. Radical Republicans thought this just as well. The next Congress would have more radicals and fewer Democrats, noted one of them, and "in the meantime I hope the nation may be educated up to our demand for universal suffrage."29
The prospect of "educating" Lincoln up to this demand seemed
28. CWL, VIII, 152.
29. Congressman James M. Ashley in Boston Commonwealth, March 4, 1865. For a skillful analysis of these confusing debates and votes on reconstruction see Herman Belz, Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War (Ithaca, 1969), 244–76.
promising. He had moved steadily leftward during the war, from no emancipation to limited emancipation with colonization and then to universal emancipation with limited suffrage. This trajectory might well carry him to a broader platform of equal suffrage by the time the war ended. The entreaty in Lincoln's second inaugural address for "malice toward none" and "charity for all" provided few clues on this question, though it seemed to endorse generous treatment of ex-rebels. At the same time this address left no doubt of Lincoln's intention to fight on until slavery was crushed forever. "Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away," said the nation's sixteenth president at the beginning of his second term. "Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled up by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.' "30
III
Ulysses S. Grant was determined that it should not take that long. During the winter, Union forces at Petersburg had fought their way westward to cut off the last road into town from the south and threaten the last open railroad. With Lee's army of 55,000 melting away by desertions while the oncoming spring dried roads after an exceptionally raw, wet winter, the final success of Grant's 120,000 seemed only a matter of time. Sherman could be expected on Lee's rear by late April, but Grant wanted the Army of the Potomac to "vanquish their old enemy" without help that might produce future gloating by Sherman's veterans. "I mean to end the business here," the general in chief told Phil Sheridan. Grant's main concern now was that he might wake one morning to find Lee gone to join Johnston's 20,000 for an attack on Sherman.31 Lee had precisely that in mind. In his effort to accomplish it, however, he gave Grant a long-sought opportunity to drive the ragged rebels from their trenches into the open.
By March, Lee had become convinced that he must soon ab
andon the Petersburg lines to save his army from encirclement. This would
30. CWL, VIII, 333.
31. Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Boston, 1969), 437; Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York, 1886), II, 424–25, 430–31, 459–61.
mean the fall of Richmond, but better that than loss of the army which was the only thread holding the Confederacy together. To force Grant to contract his lines and loosen the stranglehold blocking a rebel escape, Lee planned a surprise attack on the enemy position just east of Petersburg. Southern corps commander John B. Gordon sent false deserters to fraternize with Yankee pickets in front of Fort Stedman on the night of March 24–25. The "deserters" suddenly seized the dumbfounded pickets, and Gordon's divisions swarmed into sleepy Fort Stedman. Capturing several batteries and a half-mile of trenches, the Confederates seemed to have achieved a smashing breakthrough. But a northern counterattack recaptured all lost ground plus the forward trenches of the Confederate line, trapping many of the rebels and forcing them to surrender. Lee lost nearly 5,000 men; Grant only 2,000. Instead of compelling Grant to shorten his lines, Lee had to thin his own to the breaking point. And Grant lost little time in breaking them.
On March 29 he ordered an infantry corps and Sheridan's cavalry, recently returned from the Shenandoah Valley, to turn the Confederate right ten miles southwest of Petersburg. Lee sent George Pickett with two divisions of infantry through a drenching downpour to help the worn-down rebel cavalry counter this move. Hard fighting across a sodden landscape on the last day of March stopped the Federals temporarily. But next afternoon they launched an enveloping attack against Pick-ett's isolated force at the road junction of Five Forks. Sheridan's rapid-firing troopers, fighting on foot, attacked head-on, while Gouver-neur K. Warren's 5th Corps moved sluggishly against Pickett's flank. Storming up and down the line cajoling and god-damning the infantry to move faster and hit harder, Sheridan finally coordinated an assault that achieved the most one-sided Union victory since the long campaign began eleven months earlier in the Wilderness. Pickett's divisions collapsed, half of their men surrendering to the whooping Yankees and the other half running rearward in rout. When the news reached Grant that evening, he ordered an assault all along the line next morning, April 2.
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