(Just as he had done with emancipation, Lincoln did not wish to get very far ahead of public opinion on the issue of black voting. And, as William Lloyd Garrison noted in January, “the primary difficulty lies in the state of public sentiment towards the negro.”218 Responding to their constituents, members of Congress shied away from black suffrage; they had overwhelmingly rejected it for the Montana Territory and had refused to enfranchise the blacks of Washington. In July 1864, Garrison himself had defended Lincoln against Radical criticism of his failure to endorse black suffrage, arguing that the “elective franchise is a conventional, not a natural right.” He explained to an English abolitionist that in America, states rather than the central government determined who could vote. Garrison asked, “when was it ever known that liberation from bondage was accompanied by a recognition of political equality? Chattels personal may be instantly translated from the auction block into freemen; but when were they ever taken at the same time to the ballot-box, and invested with all political rights and immunities?” Premature granting of the suffrage to blacks might provoke a ruinous white backlash, Garrison warned presciently: “Submitted to as a necessity at the outset, as soon as the [reconstructed] State was organized and left to manage its own affairs, the white population, with their superior intelligence, wealth and power, would unquestionably alter the franchise in accordance with their prejudices.” Black voting rights, he accurately predicted, could be won over time only “by a struggle on the part of the disfranchised, and a growing conviction of its justice.”)219
Lincoln’s second objection to Ashley’s bill was “the declaration that all persons heretofore held in slavery are declared free.” That did not seem critical, for he said it was evidently “not a prohibition of slavery by Congress but a mere assurance of freedom to persons then [free] in accordance with the proclamation of Emancipation. In that point of view it is not objectionable though I think it would have been preferable to so express it.”
Lincoln and Banks “spoke very favorably, with these qualifications[,] of Ashley’s bill.” John Hay, who was present at this conversation, recorded that the general “is especially anxious that the Bill may pass and receive the approval of the President. He regards it as merely concurring in the President[’]s own action in the one important case of Louisiana and recommending an observance of the same policy in other cases.” Neither Banks nor Lincoln thought of it “as laying down any cast iron policy in the matter. Louisiana being admitted & this bill passed, the President is not estopped by it from recognizing and urging Congress to recognize another state of the South coming in with constitution & conditions entirely dissimilar.” Banks thought Congress wanted the bill passed in order to assert its prerogative in shaping Reconstruction. It was best, he thought, to accept the legislation, even if it was unnecessary, in order to win the readmission of Louisiana.220
Two days later Ashley accepted amendments designed to meet the president’s objections: slaves would be freed only in the areas already covered by the Emancipation Proclamation, and voting rights would be extended only to blacks serving in the military and to white males. In addition, Louisiana would be readmitted, but Congress would have the power to set terms for the admission of the other Confederate States. Action on this compromise measure was postponed until after Christmas.
During the holiday recess, Wendell Phillips visited Washington and reported that “the radical men feel that they are powerless and checkmated.” Henry Winter Davis “told him the game was up—‘Lincoln with his immense patronage can do what he pleases; the only hope is an appeal to the people.’ ”221 In January, Phillips made such an appeal at a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He warned that to admit Louisiana under the Banks–Hahn government would set a dangerous precedent. The “principle underlying Louisiana” was, he charged, “a brutal, domineering, infamous overseer spirit.”222 In response to Radical pressure, Ashley significantly modified the compromise bill, virtually eliminating the possibility of admitting Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee in accordance with the Ten Percent plan. In effect, the oft-modified measure was the Wade–Davis bill with black suffrage added. Moderate Republicans rebelled and the bill was tabled. Partly in response to Lincoln’s reelection, most Republican lawmakers were backing away from their earlier endorsement of the Wade–Davis approach to Reconstruction and moving toward the president’s plan. Noah Brooks reported that members who had voted in July for the Radical bill “are now willing to admit that the President’s sagacity was greater than theirs.”223 Moderates agreed with Lincoln that no rigid formula should be applied to all eleven Confederate States. As Massachusetts Representative Thomas D. Eliot put it, Congress should lay down the fundamental principles and then let the people of each state “establish their constitution; let it prohibit slavery; let them grant freedom and equality of rights, and we need nothing else.” It mattered not “how a State shall have brought itself before us, so only that it comes with a constitution that we can recognize.”224
Although the Thirty-eighth Congress would pass no Reconstruction bill, few regarded a postponement of the issue as a misfortune. Noah Brooks predicted that the Confederate States “will come back in different ways, each State acting for itself in some sovereign capacity, and as the people of the States reorganize themselves, they will revive the paralyzed powers of the State, and before the present Summer closes there will be some order brought out of the chaotic mass.”225
But in the meantime, would Congress admit Louisiana and Arkansas? Smarting from their setback on the Reconstruction bill, Radicals sought revenge. “We hope now to defeat the proposed admission of Louisiana and Arkansas, and if so the whole question will go over to the next Congress,” said Ashley. “In the meantime I hope the nation may be educated up to our demand for universal suffrage.”226 Most moderate and conservative Republicans, however, disagreed. They wanted Louisiana admitted in part because they thought the state would vote to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment.
The question arose when senators and congressmen from Louisiana asked to be seated. As the senate addressed their request in January, Lincoln tried to frame the debate by suggesting to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Lyman Trumbull, that the most important question before that body was: “Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relations with the Union sooner by admitting or by rejecting the proposed Senators?”227 The committee, which had rejected Arkansas’s senators a few months earlier, now recommended that Louisiana’s be accepted. That necessarily entailed recognizing the Hahn government, which the committee said “fairly represented a majority of the loyal voters of the State.”228
Although over half of the senate favored acceptance of the committee’s recommendation, a few Radicals, led by Charles Sumner, demurred. They objected to the Louisiana constitution’s failure to enfranchise blacks and to the Lincoln administration’s alleged usurpation of congressional prerogatives. Sumner vowed to employ “all the instruments … in the arsenal of parliamentary warfare” to block the will of the majority. The Hahn government, he charged, was “a mere seven-months’ abortion, begotten by the bayonet in criminal conjunction with the spirit of caste, and born before its time, rickety, unformed, unfinished—whose continued existence will be a burden, a reproach, and a wrong.”229 Conservative Democrats like Kentuckians Garrett Davis and Lazarus Powell, fearing that Louisiana would ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, teamed up with Sumner and a few other Radicals to conduct a successful filibuster, thus preventing recognition of the Bayou State.
Thomas J. Durant of New Orleans significantly influenced Radical opponents of the Hahn government, which he denounced as illegitimate because it had been elected under the aegis of the military. Some abolitionists regarded Durant’s argument skeptically.
Moderate Republicans indignantly denounced Sumner’s obstructionism. Richard Henry Dana thought the senator had behaved “like a madman, in the Louisiana question.” Dana did not object to the delaying tactics or Sumner’s votes, but rathe
r to “the positions he took, the arguments he advanced, and the language he used to the 20 out of 25 Republican Senators who differed from him.” Even such haughty slaveowning senators as James M. Mason, John Slidell, and Jefferson Davis “were never so insolent and overbearing as he was, and his arguments, his answers to questions, were boyish or crazy.” Dana said he would be relieved to learn that Sumner “was out of his head from opium or even N[ew] E[ngland] rum.”230 The Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican editorialized that Sumner had forfeited any claim “to the character of an honorable statesman” by resorting “to the trickery of a pot-house politician.”231 The editor thought the senator’s behavior “perfectly unjustifiable,” “undignified,” and “disgraceful.”232
Lincoln, too, was furious. He told James Ashley that Sumner “hopes to succeed in beating the President so as to change this government from its original form, and making it a strong centralized power.”233 William Henry Crook, who joined the White House staff in January 1865, recalled that one day the president’s “intense antipathy” for Sumner led him to forbid the senator admission to the Executive Mansion. Crook believed Sumner was “the only man, so far as my knowledge goes, to obtain the president’s bitter dislike.”234 It is not hard to understand Lincoln’s aversion to the vain, haughty, pedantic senator, who was thwarting the will of the overwhelming majority of his colleagues and frustrating the president’s laboriously achieved attempt to rehabilitate Louisiana. When the press began to speak of a personal rupture between Sumner and himself, however, Lincoln quickly moved to squelch the rumor by magnanimously inviting the senator to join him at the inaugural ball on March 6. Sumner complied and escorted the First Lady into the festivities at the mammoth Patent Office building, following closely behind the president. The New York Herald inferred that Lincoln now endorsed Sumner’s approach to Reconstruction. But Lincoln had not done so. He would postpone for six weeks his formal response to the senate’s action.
Lincoln was angry at the military in Louisiana as well as at Congress for failing to support the Hahn government. In September he had summoned Banks to Washington and set him to lobbying Congress on behalf of that government. Taking over Banks’s role in New Orleans were Generals E. R. S. Canby and Stephen Hurlbut, a friend of Lincoln’s from Illinois.
To Hurlbut, the president wrote a blistering letter in November: “Few things, since I have been here, have impressed me more painfully than what, for four or five months past, has appeared as bitter military opposition to the new State Government of Louisiana.” He praised the “excellent new constitution” as one that was “better for the poor black man than [the constitution] we have in Illinois.” He also commended the Hahn government, which he said had won the support of all true unionists and the enmity of all disunionists. There was no sound reason, Lincoln insisted, for the military government to show “gratuitous hostility” to that government. The president reassured Hurlbut that he would continue to regard the commanding general as the ultimate “judge and master” in Louisiana, but he sternly warned that he would not tolerate “a purpose, obvious, and scarcely unavowed, to transcend all military necessity, in order to crush out the civil government.”235
On November 29, Hurlbut replied: “I recognize as thoroughly as any man the advance toward the right made by the adoption of the Free Constitution of Louisiana, and have done and shall do all in my power to vindicate its declaration of freedom, and to protect and prepare the emancipated Bondsmen for their new status and condition. The fact has been withheld from you, Mr President, but it still exists that nothing has been done for this purpose since the adoption of the Constitution—except by military authority.”236 Dissatisfied with this response, Lincoln ordered Banks to return to Louisiana. He did not write out instructions to the general, but his intentions can be inferred from Banks’s remarks made in New Orleans in April 1865. There he addressed a mass meeting of blacks: “To the colored people of this State, I will say that the work is still going on; and by being patient, they will see that the day is not far distant when they will be in the enjoyment of all rights. … Abraham Lincoln gave his word that you will be free, and enjoy all the rights invested to citizens.”237 Presumably among those rights was the suffrage.
While lobbying Congress on behalf of the Hahn government, “Lincoln had been earnestly anxious to permit the extension of the right of suffrage to American citizens of African descent in Louisiana,” according to Pennsylvania Representative William D. Kelley. That Radical congressman recalled that it “was not a mere sentiment with Mr. Lincoln. He regarded it as an act of justice to the citizens, and a measure of sound policy for the States, and doubtless believed that those whom he invested with power were using their influence to promote so desirable an object. Of this he assured me more than once, and in the presence of others to whose memories I may safely appeal.”238 To demonstrate his sincerity, Lincoln showed congressmen and senators the March 1864 letter he had written to Hahn, gently urging him to support black suffrage. Among them was Missouri Senator B. Gratz Brown, a leading supporter of black suffrage. In a letter to his constituents, Brown quoted the president’s missive to Hahn and said that the provision of the Louisiana constitution authorizing the legislature to enfranchise blacks “was prompted by the executive head of our nation himself.”239 Congressman Thomas D. Eliot of Massachusetts was also assured by “the highest sources” (presumably Lincoln) that the Hahn government would soon enfranchise blacks.240 While the president and Banks lobbied Congress, their allies and agents on the ground in Louisiana—including Governor Hahn, B. Rush Plumy, Thomas W. Conway, A. P. Dostie, as well as the editors of the Daily True Delta and the Black Republican—were championing the cause of black suffrage.
By April, Lincoln doubtless sensed that Northern support for black suffrage was growing. That month, Frank Sanborn wrote that “the question of Reconstruction on the basis of negro suffrage is coming up for discussion everywhere, and the converts to Phillips’ view are increasing fast.” In February, Charles Slack told Sumner that among Boston businessmen “the idea of negro suffrage in the disloyal states grows daily in favor and advocacy.”241 As Lydia Maria Child pointed out, the military service of blacks was largely responsible for the change in public opinion. To keep his party together, Lincoln understood that the time was growing ripe to support black voting rights publicly. He had already done so privately to many men. But when should he announce his decision to the nation?
Visit to the Front
As he mulled over that question, Lincoln was becoming weary of the White House grind. So on March 20, when Grant invited him to visit the front for a day or two, he gladly accepted. The general had acted at the prompting of his wife, who was disturbed by press reports indicating that the president was unusually haggard. One such report appeared in the Chicago Tribune, which noted that at the inauguration, many observers “were painfully impressed with his gaunt, skeleton-like appearance.”242 The crushing burden of responsibility had taken a fierce toll on Lincoln, changing his appearance dramatically between the time he took office and his second inauguration. A life mask made in 1860 showed him to be youthful, vigorous, and healthy; a similar mask executed in 1865 showed him to be such a hollow-cheeked, worn-out old man that one artist assumed it was a death mask. Photographs corroborated the impression.
Gideon Welles noted that Lincoln was “much worn down” primarily because he took “upon himself questions that properly belong to the Departments, often causing derangement and irregularity” and thus made “his office much more laborious than he should.” In deciding to leave Washington for the army headquarters at City Point (where the James and Appomattox rivers met), he sought to escape the clamorous office seekers and their patrons. Disapprovingly, the navy secretary noted that the more often Lincoln yielded to the crowd’s importunities, “the greater the pressure upon him” grew. “It has now become such that he is compelled to flee.”243 (Democrats also criticized Lincoln’s administrative style, charging that he delegated too littl
e authority while trying to serve as “Secretary, Clerk, Scrivener, Joker, Story-teller, Clown, Doctor, Chaplain, the whole in one.” The New York Evening Express sarcastically noted that “[n]o man, it is said, works harder than does this universal genius, Mr. Lincoln. He rises with the sun, and don’t go down with the sun!”)244
At first Grant hesitated to take his wife’s advice, assuming that if Lincoln wished to visit, he would do so without being invited, but the general relented when Robert Todd Lincoln, then serving on his staff, opined that the president would come if his presence would not be intrusive. After deciding to take a brief vacation at the front, Lincoln requested Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox to make travel arrangements. Fox asked Captain John S. Barnes, commander of the U.S.S. Bat, a swift, armed blockade enforcer, if his vessel might be made suitable for the president. Barnes said he thought it could, and Fox took him to the White House for instructions. “I’m only a fresh-water sailor and I guess I have to trust you salt-water folks when afloat,” Lincoln said, adding that he “wanted no luxuries but only plain, simple food and ordinary comfort.” Whatever was good enough for Barnes, he stressed, was sufficient for him.245
The following day, however, the president told Barnes that more luxurious accommodations would be necessary, for Mrs. Lincoln had decided to join him and would be attended by her maidservant. The captain recalled that in modifying his request, Lincoln had “a certain kind of embarrassment and a look of sadness which struck me forcibly and rather embarrassed me. He appeared tired and worried.” Taken aback, Barnes replied that the Bat was not appropriate for female passengers. So he and Fox arranged to charter the River Queen, the side-wheeled passenger ship on which the Hampton Roads conference had taken place a few weeks earlier, even though Barnes feared that Lincoln was running an unnecessary risk by traveling on such a vulnerable craft. Her sister ship had recently been sunk by a bomb made to resemble a lump of coal. Fox warned Barnes to be cautious in protecting Lincoln and said he regretted “that the determination of Mrs. Lincoln to accompany the President had made the Bat an impossible home for him and his family party.”
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2 Page 139
