The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (177 page)

Just how general that satisfaction might be, he did not say, but one person in emphatic disagreement was Charles Sumner, who, as he sat listening to the drone of the clerk at the joint session, favored visitors and colleagues with a demonstration of the inefficacy of caning as a corrective for infantile behavior. Watching as he “gave vent to his half-concealed anger,” a journalist observed that, “during the delivery of the Message, the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts exhibited his petulance to the galleries by eccentric motions in his chair, pitching his documents and books upon the floor in ill-tempered disgust.”

Sumner’s disgust with this plan for reconstruction was based in
part on his agreement with the New York
Herald
editor who, commenting on the proposal that ten percent of the South’s voters be allowed to return the region to the Union, stated flatly that he did not believe there were “that many good men there.” Besides, the Bay State senator had his own notion of the way to deal with traitors, and it was nothing at all like Lincoln’s. In a recent issue of the
Atlantic Monthly
he had advocated the division of the Confederacy, as soon as it had been brought to its knees, into eleven military districts under eleven imported governors, “all receiving their authority from one source, ruling a population amounting to upward of nine millions. And this imperial domain, indefinite in extent, will also be indefinite in duration … with all powers, executive, legislative, and even judicial, derived from one man in Washington.” Although he admitted that “in undertaking to create military governors, we reverse the policy of the Republic as solemnly declared by Jefferson, and subject the civil to the military authority,” he thought such treatment no worse than was deserved by cane-swinging hotheads who had brought on the war by their pretense of secession. So far as he was concerned, though he continued to deny the right of secession, he was willing to accept it as an act of political suicide. Those eleven states were indeed out of the Union, and the victors had the right to do with them as they chose, including their resettlement with good Republican voters and the determination of when and under what conditions they were to be readmitted. Most of the members of his party agreed, foreseeing a solid Republican South.

Lincoln wanted that too, of course, but he did not believe that this was the best way to go about securing it. For one thing, such an arrangement was likely to last no longer than it took the South to get back on its feet. For another, he wanted those votes now, or at any rate in time for next year’s presidential and congressional elections, not at the end of some period “indefinite in duration.” Therefore he considered it “vain and profitless” to speculate on whether the rebellious states had withdrawn or could withdraw from the Union, even though this was precisely the issue on which most people thought the war was being fought. “We know that they were and we trust that they shall be in the Union,” he said. “It does not greatly matter whether in the meantime they shall be considered to have been in or out.”

This was a rift that would widen down the years, but for the present the Jacobins kept their objections within bounds, knowing well enough that when readmission time came round, it would be Congress that would sit in judgment on the applicants. Southward, however, the reaction was both violent and sudden. Lincoln’s ruthlessness—an element of his political genius that was to receive small recognition from posthumous friends who were safe beyond his reach—had long been apparent to his foes. For example, in addition to the unkept guarantees he had given slaveholders in his inaugural address, he had declared on revoking
Frémont’s emancipation order that such matters “must be settled according to laws made by law-makers, and not by military proclamations,” and he had classified as “simply ‘dictatorship’ ” any government “wherein a general, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation.” Thus he had written in late September of the first year of the war, exactly one year before he issued his own preliminary emancipation proclamation, which differed from Frémont’s only in scope, being also military, and which showed him to be a man who would hold to principles only so long as he had more to gain than lose by them. Observing this, Confederates defined him as slippery, mendacious, and above all not to be trusted.

Certainly Davis saw him in that light, increasingly so with the passing months, and never more so than in this early-December amnesty offer. “That despot,” he now called Lincoln, whose “purpose in his message and proclamation was to shut out all hope that he would
ever
treat with us, on
any
terms.” Acceptance would amount to unconditional surrender, Davis asserted, and by way of showing what he meant he paraphrased the offer: “If we will break up our government, dissolve the Confederacy, disband our armies, emancipate our slaves, take an oath of allegiance binding ourselves to him and to disloyalty to our states, he proposes to pardon us and not to plunder us of anything more than the property already stolen from us.… In order to render his proposals so insulting as to secure their rejection, he joins to them a promise to support with his army one tenth of the people of any state who will attempt to set up a government over the other nine tenths, thus seeking to sow discord and suspicion among the people of the several states, and to excite them to civil war in furtherance of his ends.”

Thus Davis reflected a reversed mirror-image of his adversary’s offer, saying: “I do not believe that the vilest wretch would accept such terms.” Without exception southern editors agreed. “We who have committed no offense need no forgiveness,” they protested, quoting Benjamin Franklin’s reply to a British offer of amnesty. “How impudent it is,” the Richmond
Sentinel
observed of Lincoln, “to come with our brothers’ blood upon his accursed hands, and ask us to accept his forgiveness! But he goes further. He makes his forgiveness dependent on terms.” Congress was more vigorous in its protest. Resolutions were introduced denouncing “the truly characteristic proclamation of amnesty issued by the imbecile and unprincipled usurper who now sits enthroned upon the ruins of Constitutional liberty in Washington City,” while others made it abundantly clear that the people of the Confederacy, through their elected representatives, did “hereby, solemnly and irrevocably, utterly deny, defy, spurn back, and scorn the terms of amnesty offered by Abraham Lincoln in his official proclamation.” All such resolutions were tabled, however, upon the protest by one member that they “would appear to dignify a paper emanating from that wretched and detestable
abortion, whose contemptible emptiness and folly will only receive the ridicule of the civilized world.” It was decided, accordingly, that “the true and only treatment which that miserable and contemptible despot, Lincoln, should receive at the hands of the House is silent and unmitigated contempt.”

Unmitigated this contempt might be, but silent was the one thing it was not. In fact, as various members continued to plumb and scale the various depths and heights of oratory, it grew more strident all the time. Evidently they had been touched where they were sore. And indeed, in its review of Lincoln’s message, the New York
World
had warned that such would be the case. Violence was a characteristic of the revolutionary impulse, the
World
declared; “You can no more control it than a flaxen hand can fetter flame”; so that if what the President was really seeking was reconciliation—or even, as Davis claimed, division within the Confederate ranks—he could scarcely have chosen a worse approach. “If Mr Lincoln were a statesman, if he were even a man of ordinary prudence and sagacity, he would see the necessity for touching the peculiar wound of the South with as light a hand as possible.” What the editor had in mind was slavery, and so did the frock-coated gentlemen in Richmond, along with much else which they believed was endangered by this war of arms and propaganda. In the course of their two-month session they gave the matter a great deal of attention, and before it was over they produced a joint resolution, issued broadcast as an “Address of Congress to the People of the Confederate States.” Specifically an attack on the Lincoln administration for its policies and conduct of the war, the resolution was also an exhortation for the southern people to continue their resistance to northern force and blandishments, including the recent amnesty proclamation.

About midway through the lengthy document, after charging that the Federals had provoked the war and were “accountable for the
blood and havoc and ruin it has caused,” the legislators presented a catalogue of “atrocities too incredible for narration.”

The list continued, then finally broke off. “We tire of these indignities and enormities. They are too sickening for recital,” the authors confessed, and passed at once to the lesson to be learned from them. “It is better to be conquered by any other nation than by the United States. It is better to be a dependency of any other power than of that.… We cannot afford to take steps backward. Retreat is more dangerous than advance. Behind us are inferiority and degradation. Before us is everything enticing to a patriot.” As for how the war was to be won, the answer was quite simple: by perseverance.

In conclusion—though the words came strangely from the lips of men who, despite their nominal membership in a single national party, comprised perhaps the most fractious, factious political assembly in the western world to date—the legislators recommended “unfaltering
trust,” on the part of the southern people in their leaders, as the surest guide if they would tread “the path that leads to honor and peace, although it lead through tears and suffering and blood.”

Such were the first bitter fruits of Lincoln’s proclamation, offering amnesty to individuals and seeking to establish certain guidelines for the future reconstruction of the South.