Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln did, however, urge Stanly to call for congressional elections, but before that step could be undertaken, the governor committed blunders which outraged many Radicals. At New Bern, an idealistic New Yorker named Vincent Colyer, whom Burnside had appointed as superintendent of the poor, founded two schools for blacks and one for whites. When Stanly advised him that state law forbade the education of blacks, Colyer shut the schools down, prompting Radicals to howl indignantly. Why should Northerners be “compelled to perpetuate & sustain the barbarism of North Carolina?” they asked.10 When Colyer protested to Charles Sumner, the senator escorted him to the White House on June 5, 1862 to explain the situation. As Colyer was relating his tale of woe, the president interrupted with unwonted severity and irritation: “Do you take me for a School-Committee-man?” After this outburst, he quickly shifted gears and kindly listened to the rest of Colyer’s recital.

  Lincoln replied that he was “as much astonished by the acts of Mr. Stanly as any other man in the country,” that he “most heartily disapproved of them,” and that he regretted not only the governor’s decisions but also the way they were implemented. Among Stanly’s other acts that Lincoln deplored were his return of a fugitive slave, his order mandating inspection of ships headed north to see if bondsmen had stowed away, and his decision to banish Hinton Rowan Helper’s brother for daring to give Stanly advice on how to govern the state. When Colyer said that Stanly claimed he had been instructed to enforce local laws in North Carolina, the president “remarked that that was a misapprehension on the part of the Governor” and “that the idea of closing the schools and sending back fugitive slaves and searching vessels going North, never had emanated from his administration. Such an order never had been given by him, nor would it be tolerated by him or his administration.” Lincoln insisted that “no slave who once comes within our lines a fugitive from a rebel, shall ever be returned to his master. For my part I have hated slavery from my childhood.” At the president’s behest, Stanton, who threatened to quit his post if Lincoln allowed such an outrage to stand, commanded the governor to reopen the black schools. Sumner was pleased that the president “has no sympathy with Stanly in his absurd wickedness, closing the schools, nor again in his other act of turning our camp into a hunting ground for Slaves. He repudiates both—positively.”11

  But Lincoln would not fire Stanly. When a delegation of abolitionists urged him to do so, he asked them to suggest a replacement. One of them asserted that it would be better to have nobody serving as military governor rather than a man out of sympathy with the president’s policy. When another proposed Frémont, Lincoln replied that he had “great respect” for the Pathfinder, “but the fact is that the pioneer in any movement is not generally the best man to carry that movement to a successful issue.” The delegation left convinced that Lincoln, for “all his forensic ability and his personal virtues, was not competent to grapple with the tremendous combination of issues before him.”12 Antislavery militants lamented that “the President is cautious & a little vacillating about suppressing Stanly.”13 Indignantly the abolitionist minister George B. Cheever called Lincoln’s unwillingness to remove Stanly “the worst outrage yet committed, the most impious and heaven defying.”14

  The demand for Stanly’s ouster was rooted in a fundamental policy disagreement between Lincoln and the Radicals. The president believed that Southern Unionism could be mobilized to restore Confederate states and help speed the end of the war. With good reason Radicals thought Lincoln overestimated the depth of Southern Unionism and misguidedly tailored his policies to accommodate it.

  In the Stanly–Colyer dispute, Burnside recommended that Lincoln back the governor, whose views, said the general, had been misrepresented. Though not endorsing Stanly’s school policy, Lincoln publicly expressed general support for him. The president apparently agreed with a journalist who reported from North Carolina that the governor was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t: “If Mr. Stanly returns slaves he is denounced by the north and its army; if he fails to enforce the … law, he is hated by the very people he is sent to conciliate. He may try to trim his sails to either breeze, but in vain.”15 Lincoln himself faced a similar dilemma on the national level.

  The governor threatened to resign when the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was announced in September 1862. Lincoln dissuaded him by explaining that intense Radical pressure had forced him to issue that document. Immediately after their conversation, Stanly summarized it for the editor of the Washington National Intelligencer, who in turn recorded in his diary that “Mr. Stanly said that the President had stated to him that the proclamation had become a civil necessity to prevent the Radicals from openly embarrassing the government in the conduct of the war. The President expressed the belief that, without the proclamation for which they had been clamoring, the Radicals would take the extreme step in Congress of withholding supplies for carrying on the war—leaving the whole land in anarchy. Mr. Lincoln said that he had prayed to the Almighty to save him from this necessity, adopting the very language of our Saviour, ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass from me,’ but the prayer had not been answered.”16 This disingenuous statement was an example of Lincoln’s tendency to dissemble in order to win support for emancipation.

  Two days after this conversation took place, the president further mollified Stanly by generously praising him: “Your conduct as Military Governor of that State … has my entire approbation; and it is with great satisfaction that I learn you are now to return in the same capacity, with the approbation of the War Department.” The president reminded Stanly that the Emancipation Proclamation exempted all areas where elections for Congress had been held: “I shall be much gratified if you can find it practicable to have congressional elections held in that State before January. It is my sincere wish that North Carolina may again govern herself conformably to the constitution of the United States.” As he had done with the Border States, Lincoln used the looming prospect of emancipation as an inducement to encourage occupied Confederate regions to return to the Union. But the offer would expire on January 1. Fearing that unsuitable candidates might be elected and that very few voters would turn out, Stanly delayed calling an election; eventually he ordered one for New Year’s Day, too late to qualify for the exemption. In the event, a small voter turnout made the election of congressmen seem illegitimate, and nothing came of it except Stanly’s resignation on January 15, 1863. The governor told Lincoln that the Emancipation Proclamation “crushes all hope of making peace by any conciliatory measures. It will fill the hearts of Union men with despair, and strengthen the hands of the detestable traitors whose mad ambition has spread desolation and sorrow over our country. To the negroes themselves it will bring the most direful calamities.”17 Further disenchanting Stanly was the administration’s willingness to employ blacks as troops.

  Stanly’s tenure proved a failure, though the fault was not so much his as it was the Union army’s inability to pacify the Tarheel State or to whip the Army of Northern Virginia. Lincoln appointed no successor to Stanly, evidently because he realized that there were too few Unionists in North Carolina to make the restoration of the state’s civil government possible until more territory was occupied.

  Lincoln enjoyed greater success in reconstructing Louisiana, where he appointed Colonel George S. Shepley military governor in June 1862 to preside over New Orleans and nearby parishes. Shepley, a native of Maine, had already served as military mayor of the Crescent City, a post to which General Benjamin F. Butler had named him. Like Stanly and Johnson, he received minimal instructions from the administration. The timid Shepley proved a disappointment, for he regarded himself as Butler’s agent rather than a policymaker in his own right.

  Louisiana represented a model for neighboring states to emulate, as George Boutwell, who was to play a key role in the Reconstruction drama, pointed out in 1863: “If one State even would frame a constitution and ask for admission a precedent would be established for all th
e others. Louisiana is so situated, geographically and commercially, that her lead would compel Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi to follow.”18

  A massive influx of blacks into New Orleans seriously challenged the new government. Shepley and Butler tried to staunch the flow, but General John S. Phelps, the Vermont abolitionist whose proclamation had so incensed Lincoln a few months earlier, welcomed freed slaves into his camp. In July 1862, when informed that Phelps’s policy was crushing Union sentiment in Louisiana, the president tartly dismissed the complaint as “a false pretense.” Residents of Louisiana and “all intelligent people every where,” he wrote, “know full well, that I never had a wish to touch the foundations of their society, or any right of theirs. With perfect knowledge of this, they forced a necessity upon me to send armies among them, and it is their own fault, not mine, that they are annoyed by the presence of General Phelps. They also know the remedy—know how to be cured of General Phelps. Remove the necessity of his presence. And might it not be well for them to consider whether they have not already had time enough to do this? If they can conceive of anything worse than General Phelps, within my power, would they not better be looking out for it? They very well know the way to avert all this is simply to take their place in the Union upon the old terms. If they will not do this, should they not receive harder blows rather than lighter ones?” Hinting that he might issue an emancipation order, he said portentously: “I am a patient man—always willing to forgive on the Christian terms of repentance; and also to give ample time for repentance. Still I must save this government if possible. What I cannot do, of course I will not do; but it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.”19

  By late July 1862, Lincoln had grown exasperated with the slow pace of Reconstruction efforts in Louisiana. He reproved New Orleans Unionists Cuthbert Bullitt and Thomas J. Durant for dragging their feet and for whining about the trials and tribulations of loyal slaveowners: “Of course the rebellion will never be suppressed in Louisiana, if the professed Union men there will neither help to do it, nor permit the government to do it without their help.” Those “people of Louisiana who wish protection to person and property, have but to reach forth their hands and take it. Let them, in good faith, reinaugurate the national authority, and set up a State Government conforming thereto under the constitution. They know how to do it, and can have the protection of the Army while doing it. The Army will be withdrawn so soon as such State government can dispense with its presence; and the people of the State can then upon the old Constitutional terms, govern themselves to their own liking. This is very simple and easy.”20

  In July 1862, when told that another Louisiana Unionist had complained about the vagueness of the administration’s policies, Lincoln asked heatedly: “Why will he not read and understand what I have said? The substance of the very declaration he desires is in the inaugural, in each of the two regular messages to Congress, and in many, if not all, the minor documents issued by the Executive since the inauguration. Broken eggs cannot be mended; but Louisiana has nothing to do now but to take her place in the Union as it was. … This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt. If they expect in any contingency to ever have the Union as it was, I join with the writer in saying, ‘Now is the time.’ ”21

  Impatient with Governor Shepley’s failure to organize an election, Lincoln tried to galvanize him as well as General Butler and their associates. In October 1862, he sent them a message via Louisiana Congressman John E. Bouligny, who sought to promote elections for the U.S. House in the two congressional districts under Union control. All men there, Lincoln wrote, who “desire to avoid the unsatisfactory prospect [of emancipation] before them, and to have peace again upon the old terms under the constitution of the United States” were invited to participate. Union authorities were to “give the people a chance to express their wishes at these elections. Follow forms of law as far as convenient, but at all events get the expression of the largest number of the people possible. All see how such action will connect with, and affect the proclamation of September 22nd. Of course the men elected should be gentlemen of character, willing to swear support to the constitution, as of old, and known to be above reasonable suspicion of duplicity.”22

  When this ploy failed to goad Shepley into action, Lincoln wrote him directly on November 21 expressing annoyance. “I wish elections for Congressmen to take place in Louisiana,” he reiterated, but added significantly that “I wish it to be a movement of the people of the Districts, and not a movement of our military and quasi-military, authorities there. I merely wish our authorities to give the people a chance—to protect them against secession interference. Of course the election can not be according to strict law—by state law, there is, I suppose, no election day, before January; and the regular election officers will not act, in many cases, if in any. These knots must be cut, the main object being to get an expression of the people. If they would fix a day and a way, for themselves, all the better; but if they stand idle not seeming to know what to do, do you fix these things for them by proclamation. And do not waste a day about it; but, fix the election day early enough that we can hear the result here by the first of January. Fix a day for an election in all the Districts, and have it held in as many places as you can.”23

  Unknown to Lincoln, Shepley had arranged to hold congressional elections on December 3. That day, over 7,700 voters turned out and chose the moderate Michael Hahn and the more radical Benjamin F. Flanders as U.S. Representatives. In December, when those gentlemen arrived in Washington to take their seats, their appearance touched off a fierce debate. Radicals had come to regret giving Lincoln a free hand in the Reconstruction process, especially their earlier decision to admit congressmen elected under his auspices in Virginia and Tennessee. As a result, those areas of the occupied South would be exempt from the impending Emancipation Proclamation. Some Democrats joined the Radicals in objecting to presidential Reconstruction. Lincoln was furious when told that Congress might refuse to seat Flanders and Hahn. “Then I am to be bullied by Congress, am I?” he exploded. “I’ll be d—d if I will.”24 Eventually, the House accepted their credentials. Lincoln confided to Flanders that “there was a strong effort to break down” his administration, and he urged the congressman to support him.25 He regarded the seating of Flanders and Hahn as a major victory for his Reconstruction policy, but it was a false dawn. Congress rejected the credentials of all other Representatives elected from Confederate states, and little progress was made in 1863 toward restoring civil government in Louisiana, even though the politically experienced General Nathaniel P. Banks became military commander there in December 1862.

  Squabbles between the Radicals, who dominated Louisiana’s Free State Committee, and the Conservatives, represented by the Executive Central Committee, frustrated Lincoln. In June 1863, when a spokesman for the latter group, Thomas Cottman, asked him to restore Louisiana under the antebellum constitution (which sanctioned slavery) and hold elections in November, the president demurred, insisting that “a respectable portion of the Louisiana people desire to amend their State constitution, and contemplate holding a convention for that object.” By itself, that “is a sufficient reason why the general government should not give the committal you seek, to the existing State constitution.” While the president could not “perceive how such committal could facilitate our military operations in Louisiana,” he said he did “really apprehend it might be so used as to embarrass them.” As for elections in November, he assured Cottman that “there is abundant time, without any order, or proclamation from me just now. The people of Louisiana shall not lack an oppertunity of a fair election for both Federal and State officers, by want of anything within my power to give them.” This rebuff to Cottman in
dicated that Lincoln was throwing his weight behind the Free State Committee, but doing so discreetly, for he wished to preserve harmony among the badly outnumbered Unionists. As he told Cottman, he strongly wished that “in Louisiana and elsewhere, all sincere Union men would stoutly eschew cliqueism, and, each yielding something in minor concerns, all work together. Nothing is likely to be so baleful in the great work before us, as stepping aside of the main object to consider who will get the offices if a small matter shall go thus, and who else will get them, if it shall go otherwise. It is a time now for real patriots to rise above all this.”26

  In early August 1863, Lincoln virtually ordered the implementation of the radical Free State Committee’s program. When word reached Washington that an effort was underway to hold a constitutional convention, he spelled out to Banks his hopes for Reconstruction in Louisiana. He would be glad if the state would “make a new Constitution recognizing the emancipation proclamation, and adopting emancipation in those parts of the state to which the proclamation does not apply.” He also desired to see Louisianans “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. Education for young blacks should be included in the plan.” A contract system appeared to him best suited for that purpose. Lincoln strongly suggested that Louisiana form a new constitution and hold elections before Congress met in early December. Even if the voters did not provide for the abolition of slavery, the president said he would “not, in any event, retract the emancipation proclamation; nor, as executive, ever return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.” Though he did not want his letter made public, he authorized Banks to show it to people who should know the administration’s wishes—presumably the convention delegates. He told the general that he was offering advice not orders, but when he sent copies of the letter to the Free State Committee leaders—Flanders, Hahn, and Durant—he added the endorsement: “Please observe my directions to him.” Significantly, he did not say suggestions but rather directions. Banks replied that he would execute Lincoln’s orders, not suggestions.