The Fiery Trial (54 page)

When the decisive moment came on January 31, 1865, spectators ranging from members of the cabinet and Supreme Court to ordinary black residents of Washington packed the House chambers. By a vote of 119 to 56, slightly more than the required two-thirds majority, the House approved the Thirteenth Amendment. Every Republican voted in favor, along with sixteen Democrats, all but two of them lame ducks who had been defeated or had chosen not to run in 1864. Lincoln’s former law partner John T. Stuart, now a Democratic congressman from Illinois, rejected a personal appeal from the president and voted no. Lincoln’s lobbying did, however, pay dividends among border congressmen. The five border states (including West Virginia) produced 19 votes for the amendment and only 8 against. During the debates, border congressmen who had previously opposed passage explained their change of heart. “War,” said John A. J. Creswell of Maryland, “is as subversive of theories as it is of mere physical obstacles,” and the Civil War had dispelled the idea that “the negro race” was unfit for freedom. James S. Rollins of Missouri, once “a large owner of slaves,” declared, “We can never have an entire peace in this country as long as the institution of slavery remains…. We may as well unsheathe the sword and cut the Gordian knot!” Green C. Smith of Kentucky identified slavery as the reason Ohio had “outstripped” his own state in prosperity. Thus, the old nightmare of the Lower South came to pass: the northern tier of slave states joined the North in bringing about the abolition of slavery.
⁵⁶

“Regardless of parliamentary rules,” the staid reporter for the
Congressional Globe
noted, the House erupted in “an outburst of enthusiasm” when the final tally was announced. Congressmen “wept like children” while in the galleries men threw their hats in the air and “the ladies…rose in their seats and waved their handkerchiefs.” The names of those who voted for the amendment, the
Washington Morning Chronicle
proclaimed, would go down in history beside the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln offered impromptu remarks to a group that came to the White House to celebrate. The Thirteenth Amendment, he declared, went well beyond the Emancipation Proclamation as a way to “eradicate slavery” and would erase any doubts as to the proclamation’s “legal validity.” He said that the proclamation was “inoperative” on slaves who did not come within Union lines and might have no effect on their children. “But this amendment,” he added, “is a King’s cure for all the evils.”
⁵⁷

The debate over the amendment reached its climax as one of the more unusual episodes in Lincoln’s presidency unfolded. In his message to Congress of the previous December, Lincoln had flatly rejected negotiations with the Confederacy, since the “insurgent leader” had made it clear that he would accept nothing short of “the severance of the Union.” A few days later, however, Lincoln gave Francis P. Blair Sr. permission to travel to Richmond to meet with Jefferson Davis. Blair had devised a bizarre scheme whereby the Union and Confederacy would declare an armistice and send a joint army to overthrow the regime the French had established in Mexico. Davis told Blair he was willing to “enter into conference with a view to secure peace to the two countries.”
⁵⁸

Lincoln adamantly denied that “two countries” existed. Nonetheless, he agreed to meet with a three-man peace delegation headed by Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, his old congressional colleague. News of the impending conference leaked out and threatened to derail House passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which Democrats charged would create an obstacle to peace. James Ashley, the Ohio Radical who had been rounding up votes for the amendment, implored Lincoln to deny that peace was at hand. On January 31, the day of the vote, Lincoln sent a note for Ashley to read to the House: “So far as I know, there are no peace commissioners in the city, or likely to be in it.” This was literally true since the commissioners were not coming to Washington, but certainly misleading. In any event, on February 3, Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward met with the three envoys on a naval vessel anchored off Hampton Roads, Virginia. The southerners arrived, wrote a Union army officer, accompanied by “the
bone of contention
…in the shape of a black man carrying a valise.”
⁵⁹

The Hampton Roads conference lasted for several hours and the participants agreed not to take notes. They all eventually recorded accounts of what had transpired, which generally coincide although they differ on some significant points. Seward and Stephens rambled on about the Monroe Doctrine and Blair’s Mexican scheme until Lincoln became impatient and made clear he had no interest in the idea. Lincoln insisted that no consideration of “terms and conditions” could take place until the Confederacy recognized national authority, but promised to be lenient in issuing pardons and restoring confiscated property. When one negotiator cited Charles I as an example of a ruler who entered into an agreement with rebels before a war ended, Lincoln replied, “All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head in the end.”
⁶⁰

Alexander H. Stephens later claimed that Lincoln urged him to persuade Georgia to withdraw from the Confederacy and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment with the proviso that it go into effect in five years. This seems highly unlikely; Lincoln was too good a lawyer not to know that such a codicil would have no legal effect. In Seward’s account, Lincoln simply told the Confederates that there was every reason to expect the Thirteenth Amendment soon to become part of the Constitution. Lincoln also mentioned his long-standing idea of compensated emancipation. Indeed, immediately after his return to Washington, Lincoln presented to the cabinet a proposal to distribute $400 million (the sum Greeley had proposed in his peace initiative of the previous July) to the slave states, including the border, if the war ended by April 1. The document also promised to restore all confiscated property, other than slaves, that had not been sold to third parties. The cabinet unanimously rejected Lincoln’s idea. Secretary of the Navy Welles observed that while the desire for peace was admirable, “there may be such a thing as overdoing.” “You are all against me,” Lincoln remarked, and abandoned the proposal. He failed to mention it in his report to Congress on the peace conference.
⁶¹

The Radical senator Zachariah Chandler considered the Hampton Roads proceedings “disgraceful.” But most Republicans praised Lincoln’s conduct, which they understood as an uncompromising insistence on reunion and emancipation. The outcome reinforced Republicans’ determination to press ahead with ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to settle once and for all the fate of slavery. For it to become part of the Constitution required the approval of three-fourths of the states. The admission of Nevada on the eve of the 1864 election (when some Republicans thought its three electoral votes might provide the margin of victory) had increased the number of states to thirty-six, including the eleven of the Confederacy. Thus, were the seceded states to be counted, as Lincoln insisted they must be (to do otherwise, he thought, would recognize the legitimacy of secession), ratification required twenty-seven approvals. It seemed unlikely that the three states carried by McClellan would ratify; thus five Confederate states would have to do so. The four with new governments recognized by Lincoln could be counted on—Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. Where the fifth state would come from depended on the progress of Reconstruction.
⁶²

Appropriately, Illinois was the first state to ratify. Delaware, the border state where Lincoln had begun his emancipation initiative in 1861, became the first to reject the amendment; not until 1901, long after it had become part of the Constitution, would it gain Delaware’s approval. Kentucky, with a government, one correspondent informed Lincoln, under the control of “the old secession party, and the relapsed portion of the Union party,” also refused to ratify. The place of Lincoln’s birth would have the distinction of being the only state to reject the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Nonetheless, slavery in both these border states was clearly dying. Because of black enlistment in the army, Delaware was “practically free.” As for Kentucky, “no family knows whether they have a servant to prepare breakfast for them or not,” complained the
Louisville Journal
. Soon after the House approved the Thirteenth Amendment, moreover, Congress passed the bill, mentioned in chapter 8, to free the families of black soldiers. After soliciting the advice of Secretary of War Stanton, who affirmed that it would strengthen the army by relieving black soldiers of “great anxiety” about “those whom they love,” Lincoln signed it. By the end of the war, despite slavery’s continued legal existence, nearly three-quarters of the slaves in Kentucky and Delaware had become free. The remainder, however, would not enjoy liberty until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
⁶³

“The one question of the age is
settled
,” declared Congressman Cornelius Cole of California. But if the Thirteenth Amendment solved one problem, it raised a host of others. During the debates Democrats had asked repeatedly, “What is to be done with the negroes who may be freed?” Republicans showed little desire to discuss the precise rights that would come with freedom. But a number insisted that abolition would incorporate blacks into the “national citizenship” that would emerge from the war. For the moment, however, there was no agreement as to precisely what the rights of citizens were. Most Republicans agreed with Congressman John Farnsworth that “all questions of the consequences of emancipation” should be postponed.
⁶⁴

Nevertheless, the issue of blacks’ postwar rights had a way of reappearing. The month of February 1865 witnessed remarkable breaches in the northern color line. On February 1, the day after passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Chief Justice Chase admitted John S. Rock of Boston as the first black lawyer to practice before the Supreme Court, an “extraordinary reversal” of the
Dred Scott
decision,
Harper’s Weekly
noted, and an “indication of the revolution which is going on in the sentiment of a great people.” A few days later, on Lincoln’s fifty-sixth birthday, Henry H. Garnet became the first black minister to preach a sermon in the hall of the House of Representatives. He used the occasion to claim for his people “every right of American citizenship.” Not only blacks but the nation as a whole, he proclaimed, had embarked on an exodus after a long bondage to slavery. Also in February, Lincoln approved the appointment of Martin R. Delany as the army’s first black commissioned officer, dispatching him to Beaufort, South Carolina, to raise additional black soldiers. And Illinois finally repealed its discriminatory Black Laws, the result of a campaign spearheaded by the black abolitionist John Jones of Chicago, who stationed himself at the door of the legislature “morn, noon, and evening” to lobby members. By the end of 1865, every northern state but Indiana would remove such laws from their statute books.
⁶⁵

Lincoln made no comment on the repeal or on the agitation by northern blacks for greater rights. But what John Cochrane, New York’s attorney general, called “the great problem of
the free races
” unavoidably presented itself as Congress once again debated Reconstruction. The issue was made more urgent by the actions of the government of Louisiana, the showcase for Lincoln’s Reconstruction initiative. The new legislature rejected the Quadroon Bill, which would have extended the right to vote to free men of color possessing three-quarters’ white ancestry, and made no appropriation for black education. The free blacks of New Orleans found that “vagrancy” and curfew regulations issued as part of Nathaniel P. Banks’s labor system did not distinguish between themselves and the freedpeople, placing severe restrictions on their traditional freedom of movement.
⁶⁶

Soon after the Louisiana constitutional convention of 1864, a group of free blacks established the
New Orleans Tribune
as a rallying point for Louisiana Radicalism. As editor they hired Jean-Charles Houzeau, a Belgian astronomer and journalist who had emigrated to the United States in 1858 and whose political outlook, like theirs, had been shaped by the heritage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The
Tribune
launched an assault on the army’s labor system as a reincarnation of slavery and demanded the right to vote not only for the free blacks but also for their “dormant partners,” the emancipated slaves. Houzeau made the
Tribune
a journal widely respected among northern Republicans and known even in Europe (it received a letter in 1865 from the great French novelist Victor Hugo). In January 1865 a convention of the National Equal Rights League assembled in New Orleans, bringing together urban free blacks and freedpeople from the countryside to press for complete civil and political equality. “We no longer have classes or castes among us,” declared the
Tribune
. “We are made one people and one nation…. Liberty must be the same for all.”
⁶⁷

Although the government of Louisiana made no response to these developments, Lincoln remained committed to its success. Failure in Louisiana, he wrote in November 1864, would “gladden the heart” of every enemy of the Union and “every advocate of slavery.” In his annual message to Congress the following month, Lincoln praised the “loyal State governments with free constitutions” that he had helped to establish. But complaints against the Louisiana regime received an increasingly sympathetic hearing in Congress, exacerbating divisions within the Republican party over Reconstruction. “The question of extending the right of universal suffrage to the colored race,” observed the
Washington Morning Chronicle
, “is…more difficult of practical solution than any which has ever been presented to the people of this country.” But events in Louisiana placed it on the political agenda.
⁶⁸