Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln appended this Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction to his annual message to Congress, which explained why the loyalty oath required acceptance of emancipation. Characteristically, he stressed its practical benefits. The wartime laws and proclamations regarding slavery and emancipation, he said, “were enacted and put forth for the purpose of aiding in the suppression of the rebellion. To give them their fullest effect, there had to be a pledge for their maintenance. In my judgment they have aided, and will further aid, the cause for which they were intended.” To abandon them now would be “to relinquish a lever of power.” But in addition to such pragmatic concerns, Lincoln forcefully stated moral objections to any backsliding on emancipation. Such reneging “would also be a cruel and an astounding breach of faith.” As long as he remained president, Lincoln promised, “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, or by any of the acts of Congress.” But, he added, Congress or the Supreme Court could modify the oath.

  While Lincoln’s proclamation did not allow ex-Confederate states to retain slavery, they could keep their antebellum political framework. The administration would not object if a restored state government were to provide a system of apprenticeship for freed slaves, as long as that government “shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for their education, and which may yet be consistent, as a temporary arrangement, with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class.” Lincoln justified this concession as a necessary expedient to reduce “the confusion and destitution which must, at best, attend all classes by a total revolution of labor throughout whole States.” In addition, more Confederates might be inclined to surrender if “this vital matter be left to themselves.” But ex-Confederates would not be allowed to mistreat the freed people: “no power of the national Executive to prevent an abuse is abridged by the proposition.”

  To counter objections that his proposal was premature, Lincoln stressed that Rebels might be more likely to surrender if they knew they would be treated generously. He noted that in some occupied Confederate states “the elements for resumption seem ready for action, but remain inactive, apparently for want of a rallying point—a plan of action.” The proclamation provided such a plan. But he assured Congress that he was flexible: “Saying that, on certain terms, certain classes will be pardoned, with rights restored, it is not said that other classes, or other terms, will never be included. 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 concession, leaving the plan open to change, indicated Lincoln’s willingness to have at least some blacks vote, even though his proposal enfranchised only whites. As he told Banks, the statement that other modes of Reconstruction were acceptable was added “on purpose that some conformity to circumstances should be admissible.”51 Lincoln was cautiously laying the foundation for black voting rights.

  The president acknowledged an obvious truth—that defeating the Confederacy still required military force. Rebels who wished to surrender would be more likely to step forward if they were secure from insurgent attacks. “Until that confidence shall be established, little can be done anywhere for what is called reconstruction.” In closing, he paid a handsome tribute to Union soldiers and sailors: “our chiefest care must still be directed to the army and navy, who have thus far borne their harder part so nobly and well. And it may be esteemed fortunate that in giving the greatest efficiency to these indispensable arms, we do also honorably recognize the gallant men, from commander to sentinel, who compose them, and to whom, more than to others, the world must stand indebted for the home of freedom disenthralled, regenerated, enlarged, and perpetuated.”

  To justify his plan, Lincoln cited the provision of the Constitution authorizing the chief executive “to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States” as well as the Second Confiscation Act, which stipulated that the president could “extend to persons who may have participated in the existing rebellion, in any State of party thereof, pardon and amnesty.” Lincoln’s citation of the pardoning power was strained, for the framers of the Constitution clearly meant it to apply to individual cases, not whole classes of people.52

  In tightening his grip on the reins of Reconstruction, Lincoln felt strengthened by military victories in the summer and fall as well as by the Supreme Court decision in the Prize Cases, handed down in March 1863, upholding the legality of his action during the opening weeks of the war. But he did not ignore Congress. Repeatedly he acknowledged that only the House and senate could determine whether to seat members from the Confederate states.

  Congress was at first enthusiastic about Lincoln’s plan. Members of both houses as well as other politicians considered his message “the best document yet produced by him.”53 Noah Brooks reported that it was “received with a general expression of satisfaction and relief, as indicating the most feasible method of settling reconstruction.” The message, according to Brooks, “gives, probably, more general satisfaction than any Message since the days of Washington.”54 William Dennison, former governor of Ohio and future postmaster general in Lincoln’s cabinet, lauded “the excellence and timeliness” of both the message and the proclamation.55

  For the time being, Lincoln had managed to accommodate all factions. Brooks noted that the president had “pleased the radicals and satisfied the conservatives by plainly projecting a plan of reconstruction, which is just alike to popular rights, to the cause of liberty and to the loyal people of all sections of the Union.”56 The leading senate Radical, Charles Sumner, told a reporter that the proclamation and the message “fully and perfectly satisfied” him and noted with satisfaction that the “language of the proclamation and of the accompanying message plainly assumes that the rebel States have lost their original character as States of the Union.”57 The Massachusetts senator cited Lincoln’s use of the term “reestablish” to prove his point: “We do not reestablish a government which continues to exist.”58 The conservative New York Herald shrewdly remarked that the “art of riding two horses is not confined to the circus.” The president “has for some time been riding two political horses, and with the skill of an old campaigner, he whips them—the radical horse ‘a leetle ahead’—through his message.” Throughout his administration so far, “he has given us some marvelous surprises in bringing forward the radical horse in front when it was supposed he had been hopelessly dropped behind.”59 Another conservative journal, the Washington National Intelligencer, was unusually generous in its praise.

  After observing the reaction on Capitol Hill, John Hay wrote in his diary: “I never have seen such an effect produced by a public document. Men acted as if the Millennium had come.” Senate Radicals were quite “delighted” and “beaming.” Henry Wilson told Hay: “The President has struck another great blow. Tell him from me God Bless him.” Senate Conservatives like Reverdy Johnson and James Dixon, too, “said it was highly satisfactory.” In the lower chamber the response was similar. George Boutwell called it “a very able and shrewd paper. It has great points of popularity: & it is right.” Owen Lovejoy “said it was glorious” and declared: “I shall live to see slavery ended in America.” James A. Garfield quietly remarked that the president “has struck a great blow for the country and himself.” Michigan Congressman Francis W. Kellogg gushed: “The President is the only man. He is the great man of the century. There is none like him in the world,” for “he sees more widely and more clearly than anybody.” Representative Henry T. Blow of Missouri declared: “God Bless Old Abe. I am one of the Radicals who have always believed in the President.”60 Iowa Senator James Grimes objected only to the implication that the Supreme Court might overrule the Emancipation Proclamation.

  The public, happy with the recent victories at Chattanooga and Knoxville as well as the triumphs of July, was also enthusiastic. “It only needed this message to cli
nch and rivet the wide-spread and daily growing popularity of Mr. Lincoln,” observed John W. Forney. “That he has a hold on the popular heart stronger than that of any living American, has been made clear by a thousand evidences.”61 Samuel Galloway reported to Lincoln that his message and proclamation “have strengthened public confidence in you in Ohio—and have rendered any competition for the next Presidential term utterly hopeless and forlorn—It is the best document you have written, always excepting your letter on military arrests to the Albany Committee.”62 George Templeton Strong, who recorded that the message “finds very general favor,” thought that “Uncle Abe is the most popular man in America today. The firmness, honesty, and sagacity of the ‘gorilla despot’ may be recognized by the rebels themselves sooner than we expect, and the weight of his personal character may do a great deal toward restoration of our national unity.”63 Charles Eliot Norton was also struck by the importance of Lincoln’s character: “Once more we may rejoice that Abraham Lincoln is President. How wise and how admirably timed is his Proclamation. As a state paper its naiveté is wonderful. Lincoln will introduce a new style into state papers; he will make them sincere, and his honesty will compel even politicians to like virtue. I conceive his character to be on the whole the great net gain from the war.”64 Harriet Beecher Stowe thought that Lincoln’s messages “more resembled a father’s talks to his children than a state-paper. And they have had that relish and smack of the soil, that appeal to the simple human heart and head, which is a greater power in writing than the most artful devices of rhetoric.”65 A master of such rhetorical devices, Edward Everett, called Lincoln’s message a “very remarkable document; better written than usual & calculated to produce a great effect abroad.”66

  Not everyone shared Everett’s positive view of the message’s style. A journalist deemed it “short, sharp, and decisive as a State paper, crude and angular as a literary effort.”67 Some thought the stiff opening section, dealing with foreign relations, had been penned by Seward, whose assistance had in fact been necessitated by Lincoln’s illness.

  Radicals in general were pleased because Lincoln agreed with their fundamental demand: the Union must be restored without slavery. They might differ with the president—and among themselves—about other matters, but not that one. “Stock in Father Abraham has evidently improved greatly since his message & proclamation of amnesty,” observed Republican Congressman Charles Upson of Michigan, who said he was “satisfied with any plan of Reconstruction which essentially destroys slavery. We want the snake killed this time, not ‘scotched’ merely.” Upson remarked that “ ‘Old Abe’ never goes back and though sometimes he has been thought slow in his movements he carries the country along with him on the whole pretty successfully.”68 “Let slavery be destroyed and other things will give but transitory difficulty,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune.69 The Radical Boston Commonwealth rejoiced that “the President’s plan ignores completely the present political existence of the rebel States, and subverts all their constitutions and their regulations as to suffrage, boundaries.” The Commonwealth applauded what it called Lincoln’s “conversion to the radical programme,” pointing out that he had rejected the central tenet of the Conservatives’ argument by insisting on emancipation as a prerequisite for restoration: “the President has fully made up his mind that as far as he is concerned, during his occupancy of the Presidential chair, be the term longer or shorter, no rebel State shall be again received into the Union as a slave State, or with slavery existing as a political and social element.”70 In praising Lincoln’s two “great state papers,” the New York Independent echoed those sentiments: “We are all stronger to-day, and happier, because the President has again solemnly said that the Nation’s Word must be kept, and that those set free shall not be abandoned again to bondage.”71 Months later, Radicals would change their tune. The leader of the disenchanted would be Henry Winter Davis, who feared that the popularity of Lincoln’s message guaranteed his reelection. If that proved true, he told a friend, “I certainly shall leave the country.”72

  To avoid irritating the Radicals, Lincoln omitted from his final draft a discussion of the abstract question of whether a Confederate state was in or out of the Union, a matter they considered vital. In his original draft, Lincoln said that the question “seems to me, in every present aspect, to be of no practical importance. They all have been States in the Union; and all are to be hereafter, as we all propose; and a controversy whether they have ever been out of it, might divide and weaken, but could not enhance our strength, in restoring the proper national and State relations.” The president struck out this passage in part because, as Hay noted, he believed that the clause of the Constitution guaranteeing each state a republican form of government authorized him “to grant protection to states in the Union and it will not do ever to admit that these states have at any time be[en] out.”73

  The issue of black suffrage, which eventually would prove so contentious, barely arose in 1863. Chase suggested to Lincoln that in the Reconstruction proclamation the word “voters” be changed to “citizens,” thus enfranchising blacks in the reconstructed states. (Attorney General Bates had recently ruled that some blacks were citizens, the Dred Scott decision to the contrary notwithstanding.) When Secretary of the Interior Usher remarked that “Chase was very pertinacious about the word citizen instead of voters,” Lincoln heatedly replied: “Yes, Chase thinks the negroes, as citizens, will vote to make him President.” Usher cited this as an example of Lincoln’s temper.74 Chase’s was a lonely voice, for other Radical spokesmen and journals were avoiding the question of black voting rights. Since no other cabinet member supported the treasury secretary’s position, he did not press it, saying “that he was in the main so well satisfied with it [the proclamation] that he would take no exception to it.”75 Another source of future conflict between the president and Congress, the Ten Percent provision, received little criticism at first. Lincoln chose that modest figure evidently based on the earlier response of voters in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

  While Radicals seemed satisfied, conservative Republicans like Montgomery Blair, Gideon Welles, and Orville H. Browning objected to making emancipation a requirement for Reconstruction. Most of them, however, appreciated the conciliatory spirit of Lincoln’s message as well as his willingness to leave the states and their governments intact (except for slavery) and to let Southern whites determine how the blacks were to be treated. They also liked his acknowledgment that Congress and the Supreme Court might alter the plan. To avoid an unfavorable court ruling, Lincoln could have taken the advice of Isaac N. Arnold and Leonard Swett to recommend a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, but he feared that doing so would be moving too fast. Nonetheless, in October 1863 he told Swett that he knew the time for such an amendment was fast approaching: “I can see emancipation coming; whoever can wait for it will also see it; whoever gets in the way of it will be run over by it.”76 In addition, he doubtless assumed that some Radical would introduce such a measure into Congress sooner or later. To a Louisiana Conservative, Lincoln explained that he did not regard his plan “as a Procrustean bed, to which exact conformity is to be indispensable; and in Louisiana particularly, I wish that labor already done, which varies from that plan in no important particular, may not be thrown away.”77

  Moderates shared the view of the New York Times that the president’s plan was “simple and yet perfectly effective” as well as “inevitable.”78 They found especially noteworthy its rejection of Sumner’s state suicide doctrine, while insisting that slavery be abolished.

  Some ultra-Radicals denounced the amnesty plan as “all wrong,” and a “great error” rooted in “dangerous conservatism.”79 But the New York Evening Post spoke for most vigorous opponents of slavery when it praised Lincoln’s generosity: “Nothing, it must be admitted, could be more magnanimous or lenient towards the rebels; they have put themselves beyond the pale of the law by their insanity; their properties are already declared
confiscate and their lives are in jeopardy; and if they continue contumacious, the whole of the beautiful region they inhabit will be inevitably overrun by our armies, their fields laid waste, their cities and towns desolated, and their homes pillaged. But in this dire strait the President offers them not only a peace which shall save them from the miseries of war, but an honorable pardon which shall endue them with all the attributes of the citizen. The very condition, moreover, on which they are asked to accept these boons, is a beneficent one—the renunciation of that monstrous idol of slavery, which has been the source of all their sacrifices and sufferings and woes.” The editors noted with approval that Lincoln was emulating George Washington’s magnanimity in dealing with the leaders of the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion.80 Some Southerners agreed. The Nashville Daily Press, a conservative paper, predicted that Lincoln’s plan would appeal to a large majority of Tennessee voters, for it would relieve them of military government.

  Democrats were less supportive, arguing that the “simply absurd” Ten Percent plan amounted to minority rule.81 “When this proposition is accepted,” said the Cincinnati Enquirer, “we had better burn up all the copies of the Declaration of Independence, for they will remind us of our apostasy and shame, and openly admit that our political system is a Despotism pure and simple—as much so as Russia or Austria.” The Enquirer fumed that Lincoln’s plan was “as crude and unconstitutional as it is impolitic,” for it was essentially an attempt to impose “upon the Union men of the South the Emancipation Proclamation as a test.”82 In Iowa, a Democratic journal derided the “absurd” amnesty offer and sniffed that “no people alive to self-respect” could accept it. If they did so, they would deserve “not only to lose the slaves they have but to become bound to them in the bonds of the most galling servitude.”83 Democrats also alleged that Lincoln’s Ten Percent plan cynically aimed to restore Southern states in such a way that they would vote Republican in 1864.