Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Yet in his annual message, Lincoln did just that, boldly claiming that the electorate had endorsed the amendment: “It is the voice of the people now, for the first time, heard upon the question.” And so he urged its immediate passage. In justifying such a recommendation, Lincoln noted that the “next Congress will pass the measure if this does not. Hence there is only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States for their action. And as it is to so go, at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better?”

  Lincoln’s motives were partly political. He evidently calculated that the amendment might help heal the breach in the Republican ranks by rendering moot the thorny question of whether Congress had the power to abolish slavery by statute. Moreover, with the slavery issue solved, some Democrats might be more willing to join the Republicans, who had won in 1860 and 1864 only because of highly unusual circumstances.

  The president also argued that rapid adoption of the amendment might shorten the war. In December he lobbied the slaveholding Missouri Congressman James S. Rollins, who had voted against the amendment in the spring. “I am very anxious that the war should be brought to a close,” he told Rollins, “at the earliest possible date, and I don’t believe this can be accomplished as long as those fellows down South can rely upon the Border States to help them; but if the members from the Border States would unite, at least enough of them to pass the 13th amendment to the Constitution, they would soon see they could not expect much help from that quarter, and be willing to give up their opposition, and quit their war upon the Government; this is my chief hope and main reliance, to bring the war to a speedy close, and I have sent for you, as an old Whig friend, to come and see me, that I might make an appeal to you to vote for this amendment. It is going to be very close; a few votes one way or the other will decide it.” When Rollins agreed to support it, Lincoln offered profuse thanks and asked him to persuade Missouri colleagues to follow suit. He urged Rollins to tell “them of my anxiety to have the measure pass,” for it “will clinch the whole subject.” Rollins said he had “never seen any one evince deeper interest and anxiety upon any subject than did Mr. Lincoln upon the passage of this amendment.” The congressman was as good as his word, lobbying his colleagues on behalf of the amendment.89

  Patronage considerations may have helped induce Rollins and his fellow Missourian Austin A. King to change their votes. In September the death of a federal judge in Missouri had created a vacancy on the bench. On December 7, Lincoln consulted with Abel Rathbone Corbin, a wealthy financier and former resident of Missouri then living in New York. Corbin also called on Interior Secretary John P. Usher, with whom he schemed to gain the votes of Rollins and King. Usher thought he could persuade Rollins and that Corbin would be able to win over King “by co-operation” (i.e., favors). Corbin told the president he would guarantee nothing to either Representative, but would like “to have ‘a serpent hanging’ up ‘on a pole’ in the sight of all.” Therefore he counseled Lincoln not to fill the judgeship until after the House had passed the amendment. Corbin promised the president that “if you will allow a vacancy to remain unfilled, and allow it to be known to Sec. Usher that it is unpromised, I will please you by the result. Your amendment shall pass. I can get you some New York votes.” Even if he could not persuade Democrats to reverse their earlier vote, they might be convinced to absent themselves. (Corbin reminded Lincoln that the two-thirds vote requirement applied only to the members present, not the entire House.) Thus the amendment might pass and even gain ratification by the time of Lincoln’s second inauguration.90 Both Rollins and King made passionate speeches in favor of the amendment. It is not clear whether their enthusiasm had anything to do with the vacant judgeship, but it may well have. According to Elizabeth Blair Lee, writing two days after the amendment passed, Rollins “has the credit of carrying the constitutional amendment.”91

  Lincoln recruited another Democratic congressman, the lame-duck Samuel S. Cox of Ohio, to lobby his colleagues. Cox, who enjoyed great respect among his party confreres in the House, had voted against the amendment that spring but after the election changed his mind. In December, eager to eliminate the slavery question from politics, he met with New York Democratic leaders S. L. M. Barlow, Samuel J. Tilden, and Manton Marble to discuss the amendment. He argued that the party should cast off the “proslavery odium” and “get rid of the element [of slavery] which ever keeps us in a minority and on the defensive.”92 During the holiday recess, Cox called at the White House with John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s former law partner and, like Cox, a lame-duck Representative. They urged the president to make a good-faith effort to end the war through honorable negotiations.

  Lincoln told Cox and Stuart that he wanted their assistance in winning Democratic support for the amendment. Cox “promised the President his help, provided a sincere effort was made for peace within the Union.” If that effort failed, Cox added, he would still pitch in: “not only by his help would the amendment be adopted, but the war would be pursued with renewed vigor.”93

  (Lincoln had met earlier with Cox, who claimed that he was both “a good friend” to the administration and “a good Democrat at the same time.” The congressman’s statement reminded Lincoln of an old sow belonging to one Jacob Straus. When she could not be found for several days, Straus told his two sons that she “was down the creek somewhere, for he saw where she had been rooting among the ironweeds, and he was going to find her.” He instructed his boys to help him: “Now you go over the creek and go down that side of it, and I’ll go down this side and we’ll find her, for I believe she is on both sides of the creek.” Lincoln believed Cox was “trying to be on both sides of the creek.”)94

  In the end, Cox voted against the amendment, maintaining that it “would prove an insurmountable obstacle to peace and union.”95 He had intended to vote for it but was planning to move to New York and received hints from Democrats there that he had better not support the amendment. A colleague believed that he would have voted for the measure if his vote had been required to pass it. He evidently did appeal to some Democrats effectively, however, for Seward—who organized a high-pressure lobbying operation on behalf of the amendment—later declared that it was the Ohio congressman “to whom, personally, more than any other member, is due the passage of the constitutional amendment in Congress abolishing African slavery.”96 Perhaps to encourage Cox, Lincoln authorized James W. Singleton and Francis P. Blair, Sr., to undertake peace missions to Richmond. (Their exploits are discussed later in this chapter.)

  In mid-January, when the amendment seemed doomed to fail yet again, Lincoln stepped up his efforts to win support for it. Congressman Ashley prodded him, saying: “You must help us one vote [.] Don[’]t you know of a sinner in the opposition who is on praying ground?”97 The president told a pair of House members that two more votes were needed and that they were to be obtained by hook or crook. He evidently implied that favors could be expected from the administration in return for those votes. As a Democratic opponent of the amendment remarked on the House floor, the “wish or order of the President is very potent. He can punish and reward.”98 Lincoln tried to woo a Representative who had lost a sibling in the war, saying: “your brother died to save the Republic from death by the slaveholders rebellion. I wish you could see it to be your duty to vote for the Constitutional amendment ending slavery.”99

  No evidence survives that Lincoln offered a specific quid pro quo for votes, but it seems that he authorized his lieutenants to do so (particularly Seward and Ashley, the floor manager of the amendment.) Ashley cut a deal with Democratic Representative Anson Herrick of New York, who was lobbied by New Yorkers Abram Wakeman and Charles A. Dana as well as Congressmen Ashley, Augustus Frank, and Homer A. Nelson. (Nelson, who spoke with Herrick several times, claimed he had Seward’s authorization to offer a reward.) They assured Herrick that his brother would receive a federal job in return for the congressman’s vote. After the amendment passed, Lincoln allegedly to
ld Herrick “in person that whatever Ashley had promised should be performed, and he signified his good faith by sending the name [of Herrick’s brother] to the Senate.”100 (In March, Lincoln did nominate Hugh Herrick as an assessor of internal revenue, but the senate did not confirm him.)

  Ashley did not always receive Lincoln’s support. The Ohioan had been approached by spokesmen for the Camden and Amboy Railroad of New Jersey, who wanted to stop Charles Sumner’s bill ending their monopoly control of train service between New York and Philadelphia. If Ashley could have Sumner’s measure postponed, the railroad would encourage a pair of New Jersey Democratic congressmen either to support the Thirteenth Amendment or to absent themselves when it came up for a vote. After Sumner rebuffed him, Ashley asked the president to lobby the senator, asserting that Sumner “thinks the defeat of the Camden & Amboy monopoly would establish a principle by legislative enactment, which would effectually crush out the last lingering relics of the States’ Rights dogma.”

  “I can do nothing with Mr. Sumner in these matters,” Lincoln explained, according to a memo by Nicolay. “While Mr. Sumner is very cordial with me, .… I think he would be all the more resolute in his persistence … if he supposed I were at all watching his course on this matter.”101

  When the Senate Commerce Committee refused to report Sumner’s bill, and two New Jersey Democratic congressmen (George Middleton and Andrew J. Rogers) failed to show up for the vote on the Thirteenth Amendment, it was widely rumored that the president had struck a deal. In light of Nicolay’s memo, that seems highly unlikely. Ashley may have misled the Camden and Amboy lobbyists into thinking that the president would cooperate. Possibly those lobbyists convinced the Commerce Committee that bottling up Sumner’s bill would yield political gains. In any event, the railroad appears to have persuaded Congressman Rogers, who had strongly opposed the amendment and had ties to the Camden and Amboy, to remain absent when the vote was taken. In the House, Lincoln’s operative James S. Rollins explained that Rogers was “confined to his room several days by indisposition.”102 Rollins’s involvement suggests that some arrangement had been made with the White House. Middleton’s absence is more easily explained, for he was an opponent of slavery who tended to skip tough votes.

  A Pennsylvania Democratic congressman whose election was being contested, Alexander Coffroth, voted for the amendment apparently in return for Republican pledges that the party would support his claim to a legislative seat. Moses Odell, a Democrat representing Brooklyn, received the coveted post of naval agent in New York after supporting the amendment (in both 1864 and 1865). Lame-duck Congressman George Yeaman of Kentucky, who had voted against the amendment in 1864, supported it in 1865. In August of that year, he was named minister to Denmark. (In 1862, he had practically begged Lincoln for an office. “I would like right well to have a good office,” he wrote. “I don[’]t want any office, but I do want the comforts and salary of a good office, I need them, and I deserve them.” Immodestly, he claimed that he was “qualified for anything from Brig Genl or District Judge down to anything except a Clerkship—I would not make a good clerk—it is so mechanical.”)103

  Seward’s agents evidently offered cash for votes. In early January, one of the more prominent of them, Robert W. Latham, told the secretary of state that he had “no doubt about passing” the amendment, for “[m]oney will certainly do it, if patriotism fails.”104 Latham was a shady character who had worked closely with the notoriously corrupt John B. Floyd, Buchanan’s secretary of war. Of the sixteen Democrats voting for the amendment, six represented New York districts. The Seward lobby evidently persuaded the Democrats’ flagship newspaper, the New York World, to change its anti-amendment stance to quasi-neutrality. Other important papers were also cajoled into taking similar action.

  Just how much corruption was involved in the passage of the amendment is hard to measure. According to Montgomery Blair, Seward “made Lincoln believe that he had carried that Amendment by Corruption.” Blair denied Seward’s contention, insisting that the only case resembling bribery was the post offered to Anson Herrick’s brother. Blair gave most credit to Dean Richmond, leader of the upstate New York Democracy. The Democrats who voted for the amendment, Blair insisted, did so for “patriotic and party considerations.”105

  S. S. Cox told a different tale of corrupt New Yorkers. Many years after the event, he alleged that a Radical who was boarding at the same house with him acknowledged that men in the Empire State were offering substantial bribes to Democrats willing to vote for the amendment.

  On January 31, as the hour for voting on the Thirteenth Amendment drew near, rumors swept through the House that Confederate peace commissioners were en route to the capital. Ashley panicked, fearing that the news might prompt some Democrats to backslide and defeat the measure. To prevent that, he appealed to Lincoln, who was busy writing instructions for Seward’s use in negotiating with the Confederate emissaries. To calm the storm, he penned a disingenuous message: “So far as I know, there are no peace commissioners in the city, or likely to be in it.” This was a clever lawyer’s quibble, for Lincoln knew full well that commissioners were en route to Hampton Roads, Virginia, where they would meet with Seward to discuss peace terms.106 This “little secret piece of history” amused Lincoln, who told a caller several days later, “I eased it [the amendment] along—and concluded to send Seward down” to Fort Monroe. Recalling Ashley’s fear that his Democratic “converts” might “have gone off in a tangent at the last moment had they smelt Peace,” Lincoln laughed and repeated that phrase “as far as I know.”107

  With peace rumors thus squelched, the amendment narrowly won House approval by a margin of 119 to 56, with all Republicans and sixteen Democrats voting for it and eight Democrats absent and not paired. (If four of those absentees had voted no, the amendment would have failed.) Six Representatives who had voted against it earlier were absent or not voting, and ten who had been absent for the June 1864 ballot now supported it. As the voting proceeded, one Republican congressman wrote to his wife: “I never felt so much excitement over any measure before.”108 The “scene that followed the announcement of the result of the vote was worthy of the great event,” Carl Schurz reported. “All arose as at a word of command” and “embraced, they shook hands, and ten minutes passed before the hurrahing and the enthusiastic racket ceased.”109 Women spectators fluttered their white handkerchiefs, transforming the packed galleries into a blizzard scene, while men cheered thunderously, threw their hats in the air, and vigorously waved their canes. Blacks in the galleries, including Henry Highland Garnet, also cheered heartily. “Oh what a pepper and salt mixture it was,” Garnet remembered.110 Lincoln was equally delighted when Isaac N. Arnold and other congressmen friendly to the administration brought him the news. It “filled his heart with joy,” Arnold recalled, for he “saw in it the complete consummation of his own great work, the emancipation proclamation.”111

  Lincoln’s active lobbying of congressmen was highly unusual, for he generally obeyed the Whig dictum that the executive should defer to the legislature when statutes were being framed. He seldom initiated or vetoed legislation. His willingness to intervene so vigorously for the Thirteenth Amendment was yet another indication of his deep commitment to black freedom.

  William Lloyd Garrison fully appreciated that commitment, writing to the president shortly after the amendment passed: “God save you, and bless you abundantly! As an instrument in his hands, you have done a mighty work for the freedom of the millions who have so long pined in bondage in our land—nay, for the freedom of all mankind. I have the utmost faith in the benevolence of your heart, the purity of your motives, and the integrity of your spirit.”112 On February 4, before an enthusiastic crowd in Boston’s Music Hall, Garrison asked rhetorically: “And to whom is the country more immediately indebted for this vital and saving amendment of the Constitution than, perhaps, to any other man?” The reply was obvious: “I believe I may confidently answer—to the humble railsplitt
er of Illinois—to Presidential chain-breaker for millions of the oppressed—to Abraham Lincoln!” The president “will never consent under any circumstances to the re-enslavement of any one of the millions whose yokes he has broken.”113

  Lincoln modestly disclaimed credit while praising Garrison’s role in the abolition of slavery. In April 1865, he told Lieutenant Daniel H. Chamberlain of the U.S. Colored Cavalry: “I have only been an instrument. The logic and moral power of Garrison, and the anti-slavery people of the country and the army have done all.”114 To John Murray Forbes, the president described Garrison “as one of ‘the Powers[,]’ a Radical with a substratum of common sense and practical wisdom.”115

  The day after the House passed the amendment, Lincoln responded to White House serenaders that he “could not but congratulate all present, himself, the country and the whole world upon this great moral victory.” He hailed it as “a very fitting if not an indispensable adjunct to the winding up of the great difficulty.” It was essential “to remove all causes of disturbance in the future; and to attain this end it was necessary that the original disturbing cause should, if possible, be rooted out.” The Emancipation Proclamation “falls far short of what the amendment will be when fully consummated.” If the Proclamation were all that protected the freedom of the slaves, its legal validity might be questioned and it could also be argued “that it only aided those who came into our lines and that it was inoperative as to those who did not give themselves up, or that it would have no effect upon the children of the slaves born hereafter. In fact it would be urged that it did not meet the evil. But this amendment is a King’s cure for all the evils. [Applause.] It winds the whole thing up.” It “was the fitting if not indispensable adjunct to the consummation of the great game we are playing.”116