Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (43 page)

Intellectual conviction sustained Lincoln’s utilitarianism. Persisting in his duty of seeking the divine purpose, and sure that emancipation was God’s will, he saw nothing in events to show he was wrong. Disasters, as at Fredericksburg, might mean that “the Almighty is against us,” but they did not signal God’s disapproval of an emancipationist course. By the spring of 1864 the nation was well down the road to extinguishing slavery, but this was not what, three years earlier, “either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it.” It seemed increasingly clear that “God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that . . . the North as well as . . . the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong.” In similar vein he told the English abolitionist Eliza Gurney, “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. . . . [W]e must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion.”
⁸²

God then had so ordered events that Lincoln felt increasingly justified in giving play to his emancipationist instincts. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” he told Hodges and other Kentuckians, but he had never allowed his “primary abstract judgment on the moral question” to overrule his constitutional obligations. In the earlier part of his presidency he had not completely smothered his antislavery inclinations: with a nuance often missed, he noted that he had “done no official act in
mere
deference” to these feelings; the executive office conferred no “
unrestricted
right to act officially upon this judgment.”
⁸³
But his scope for constitutional action against slavery had gradually broadened. Publicly reverting to the moral, Scripture-laced language that he had used before becoming president, Lincoln wrote down his thoughts for a delegation of Baptists, in May 1864: “To read in the Bible, as the word of God himself, that ‘In the sweat of
thy
face shalt thou eat bread,’ and to preach therefrom that, ‘In the sweat of
other mans
faces shalt thou eat bread,’ to my mind can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity.” And when “professedly holy men of the South” reinterpreted the Golden Rule (“As ye would all men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them”) by asking “the christian world to aid them in doing to a whole race of men, as they would have no man do unto themselves,” they engaged in far greater hypocrisy and insult to God “than did Satan when he tempted the Saviour with the Kingdoms of the earth.”
⁸⁴

In alluding to slavery as an abuse of labor, Lincoln can be read as promoting the wartime development of the Republicans’ free-labor philosophy. The historian Heather Cox Richardson has shown how, once in national office, the party pursued measures which effectively equated Unionism with dynamic capitalist growth and the opening of economic opportunity for ordinary American farmers, workers, and small manfacturers of modest wealth. This was a program to which Lincoln himself was ready to lend his weight: like other Republicans, he believed that in the United States there was nothing to fix “the free hired laborer . . . to that condition for life,” that individual energy and industry in a fluid society gave realistic hope of self-advancement, and that there was a harmony of interests between labor, as the sole creator of wealth, and capital.
⁸⁵

The Republican economic program had a hard moral core. Its proponents, Lincoln intimated, would surely be less vulnerable than the champions of slavery when held to account on the day of judgment. “When brought to my final reckoning, may I have to answer for robbing no man of his goods; yet more tolerable even this, than for robbing one of himself, and all that was his.” There is little in Lincoln’s recorded words to suggest that he believed in an afterlife, no matter how often he brooded about death, or how much he wanted to share the common belief in a reunion with loved ones beyond the grave. More powerful in Lincoln’s thought than a celestial day of reckoning was the terrestrial judgment of history. As the historian Robert V. Bruce has shrewdly argued, Lincoln found consolation in the idea that mortals would survive not in “Heaven” but in “memory.” His awareness of living during momentous times and his sense of moral duty to future generations—“through time and in eternity”—acquired an extra edge after he had issued his preliminary emancipation order. “Fellow-citizens,
we
cannot escape history,” he wrote in December 1862. “We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. . . . The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
⁸⁶

Lincoln learned from his many religious visitors that his emancipationist reading of God’s will, of Scripture, and of historical duty had secured for him what he described as “the effective and almost unanamous support” of “the good christian people of the country.” It is hard to say precisely how valuable those religious voices were in stiffening Lincoln’s intellectual resolve, but they clearly brought real comfort. During the dark days of 1862, when Noyes Miner told him that “Christian people all over the country are praying for you as they never prayed for a mortal man before,” Lincoln’s reply evinced more than simple politeness: “This is an encouraging thought to me. If I were not sustained by the prayers of God’s people I could not endure this constant pressure. I should give up hoping for success.”
⁸⁷

Lincoln’s resolving to make emancipation a nonnegotiable war aim had implications for how he would approach southern reconstruction and the restoration of loyal governments. This was a sharply contested issue and one which he knew would exercise the Thirty-eighth Congress when it convened in December 1863, for by then Grant’s relief of Chattanooga in October had been added to the military successes of the summer and had misleadingly opened up the prospect of the enemy’s prompt collapse. Opposition Democrats included those for whom restoration and reconciliation demanded little more than a simple—but entirely unrealistic—amnesty for all and a return to the prewar Union, with slavery and the southern way of life intact. More significant were the conflicting pressures Lincoln faced from the ideological poles of his own party. Conservative Republicans wanted an end to slavery, but otherwise sought a generous political settlement for southern whites, especially former Whigs and small farmers; encouraged by Montgomery Blair, some countenanced deportation to resolve the volatile issue of postwar race relations. In contrast, an increasingly assertive group of radicals wanted to see a fundamental reordering of southern life before the rebels returned. Through secession and war, they argued, the Confederate states had constitutionally disintegrated. Congress, gatekeeper to the Union by virtue of its power over its own membership, had jurisdiction over the rebel South, and should ensure that emancipation was the stepping-stone to equal civic and political rights for blacks. Some, including Sumner, even favored the landless enjoying a color-blind redistribution of rebel property.

Lincoln had from the outset addressed the issue of restoration. He offered no single plan, since that might become a straitjacket. The issues were too sensitive and the local experience too varied for that. But he did develop a broad approach to reconstruction, shaped by his own temperamental preference and constitutional conviction, and by military and political need. The law and the Constitution would be his guide to action, not vindictiveness or hatred. The West Virginia experience showed that reaching out to, not repelling, the Confederacy’s Unionist elements was the intelligent priority. These loyalists, Lincoln believed in the early stages of the conflict, constituted a huge southern reservoir of support waiting to be channeled. They should not be blamed for the actions of the misguided minority of individuals who had overturned republican government and declared independence. In legal fact there had been no secession: the states inhabited by the rebels remained under the jurisdiction of the federal authorities and the Constitution. That document gave the president, as commander-in-chief, control of wartime reconstruction policy. He was obliged to nurture local initiatives toward restoring self-government. Bottom-up republicanism and self-reconstruction by local Unionists would secure an early end to the rebellion. A lasting peace would have to be built not through revolutionary shocks but by means of moderate, constitutionally nourished, gradual change. In this way, Lincoln judged, he had the best hope of maintaining the Union political consensus essential to victory.

Translated into practical policy, Lincoln’s approach meant giving authority to local military commanders, who, as the Union armies advanced, would identify and sustain kernels of loyalty, and would prepare the ground for elections to restored governments. Early in 1862 Lincoln appointed “military governors” for those parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee then under federal control. In three cases the experiment yielded little to celebrate, but in Louisiana—where New Orleans fell to the Union in April—the regime of Ben Butler as commander of the city, and George F. Shepley as military governor, promised more. Lincoln thought the state might become a model for others, and partly because of this it attracted the nation’s chief attention throughout wartime discussion of reconstruction.

The presence in New Orleans of an educated and propertied free black population alongside one of the most substantial white Unionist communities in the lower South seemed to offer a viable nucleus from which to build a loyal state government. However, Louisiana loyalists were divided along a conservative-radical fault line, defined by their contrasting intentions over slavery. Needing to hold together this loyalist coalition of pro-slavery planters and antislavery businessmen and workers, Lincoln was reluctant to see any local policy that would frighten off the conservatives, and even after issuing his preliminary emancipation order he continued to offer “peace again under the old terms under the constitution.”
⁸⁸
This, however, would depend on their moving swiftly to holding elections in the Unionist enclave. A December vote in two congressional districts saw the election of two loyalist candidates, Benjamin F. Flanders and Michael Hahn: in the warm afterglow of the final Emancipation Proclamation, congressmen agreed to admit them, suppressing their concerns about Lincoln’s conservatism and his forceful use of executive power. But radical doubts deepened when Nathaniel Banks, replacing Butler, established a harsh “free-labor” regime to control the thousands of ex-slaves whose presence portended economic chaos, social confusion, and a threat to military efficiency. Was this really the meaning of black freedom?

Lincoln let Banks’s contractual labor system stand. But in the battle between Louisiana conservatives, who wanted to organize the state under the prewar constitution, and the free-state men, the president’s instincts and private encouragement favored the progressives. He told Banks in August 1863 that he did not want “to assume direction” of the state’s affairs—local self-government was a better, perhaps the only proper, tool of liberation—but that he “would be glad for her to make a new Constitution recognizing the emancipation proclamation, and adopting emancipation in those parts of the state to which the proclamation does not apply.” Intimating his preference for a gentle evolution out of slavery, he continued: “And while she is at it, I think it would not be objectionable for her to 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.” Lincoln urged Banks to “confer with intelligent and trusty citizens of the state” and prepare the way for a state constitutional convention that would eliminate slavery.
⁸⁹
Only in December did a dismayed Lincoln discover that Banks, preoccupied by military affairs in his vast Department of the Gulf, still had not acted.

By then Lincoln had himself given a lead, setting out clearly for the first time—in his annual message to Congress on December 8—his own statement of policy on national reconstruction. It had been almost a year since his Emancipation Proclamation, and longer still since he had had to recognize that he had seriously overestimated Unionist strength, but he had not previously pushed the logic to the point of declaring a single, overarching, federally sponsored scheme of reconstruction which explicitly demanded an end to slavery. The political and military arguments for caution had been real enough, but so, too, had Lincoln’s constitutional scruples, especially over an “absolutist” assault on slavery in the Louisiana enclave and other “exempted localities” of the proclamation. The complex geometry of reconstruction strategy led Lincoln to describe it as “the greatest question ever presented to practical statesmanship.” But by late 1863 he was ready to broadcast his solution, emboldened by Chattanooga and the fall election results which gave the administration a new and unaccustomed confidence. Sensing that he needed to give an unequivocal lead (“a rallying point”) to free-state forces in Louisiana and elsewhere, and fearing that a sudden Confederate collapse might result in a reunion without emancipation, Lincoln announced a scheme of oath-taking, pardon, and government reorganization in the disloyal South. When as few as 10 percent of the eligible voters in 1860 had taken an oath of future loyalty and pledged to abide by his Emancipation Proclamation and congressional acts about slavery, they could set up a state government, which he would recognize.
⁹⁰

The plan proved a political masterstroke. Lincoln enjoyed the rare treat of being feted, at least in public, by both radicals and conservatives. The latter were pleased that he offered to recognize the prewar boundaries and laws of the disloyal states, slavery excepted; that he acknowledged local control; and that he would tolerate a gradual adjustment to freedom, raising no objections if the new governments passed laws “consistent, as a temporary arrangement” with the freedmen’s “present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class.” For their part, jubilant Republican radicals celebrated the president’s commitment to permanent freedom, his promise to see no slaves freed by the proclamation returned to slavery, his resort to a strict loyalty oath, and his nod toward congressional authority over the admission of members returned by newly reorganized states. An initiative that won the approval not only of Chase, Chandler, and Sumner but also of Blair and Reverdy Johnson was no mean feat. Both Noah Brooks and John Hay reeled in wonderment at the arrival of “the political millennium.”
⁹¹