The Fiery Trial (49 page)

Meanwhile, two representatives of the free black community of New Orleans, Arnold Bertonneau, a wealthy wine dealer, and Jean Baptiste Roudanez, a plantation engineer, traveled to Washington to present a petition with more than 1,000 signatures advocating suffrage for free-born blacks like themselves. Once in the capital, the two came into contact with Charles Sumner, at whose behest they added a request that “those born slaves,” especially black soldiers, should also be enfranchised. On March 12, 1864, Lincoln met with the two men at the White House. According to newspaper reports, he told them that he had no objection to intelligent black men voting but that to impose this requirement on Louisiana would jeopardize his primary task, suppressing the rebellion. The next day, however, Lincoln wrote to Governor Hahn, suggesting “for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people not be let in.” He singled out “the very intelligent”—men like Bertonneau and Roudanez—but added, “and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.” This was the only occasion on which Lincoln intervened in a state’s Reconstruction process to promote blacks’ civil or political rights rather than the abolition of slavery. Hardly a ringing endorsement of black suffrage, it nonetheless represented a major departure for him. It underscored his growing conviction that in fighting for the Union, black soldiers had staked a claim to citizenship in the postwar nation. And it envisioned a significant departure from the terms of the Ten Percent Plan.
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The Louisiana constitutional convention assembled in April 1864. It not only abolished slavery immediately but also tried to reconstruct the politics and society of the state. The constitution made New Orleans the capital and sharply increased its representation in the legislature at the expense of plantation counties. It included forward-looking provisions such as a minimum wage on public works, a system of free public education, and a progressive income tax. “We have changed all the elements of society,” Banks wrote. “Rhode Island or Massachusetts is as likely to become a slave state, as Louisiana is to reestablish the institution.” But when it came to extending rights to blacks, resistance to change dominated. “Prejudice against the colored people is exhibited continually,” reported a correspondent of Chase, “prejudice bitter and vulgar.” Some delegates who favored abolition also called for the expulsion of the entire black population from the state, even though black soldiers were guarding the convention hall. The convention petitioned Congress to compensate loyal owners for their loss and ignored Lincoln’s “suggestion” regarding partial black suffrage. Only after intense lobbying by Governor Hahn, who showed Lincoln’s letter to key delegates, did the delegates authorize the legislature to extend the right to vote in the future and to give black children access to a separate system of public schools.
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To Lincoln, the key provision was abolition. He urged the swift ratification of the new constitution and insisted that all federal appointees in Louisiana support it. Early in September, voters in and around New Orleans approved it and elected a legislature and members of Congress. Lincoln hailed the outcome and urged General Stephen A. Hurlbut, who had replaced Banks, to cooperate with the new government. The constitution, Lincoln observed, was “better for the poor black man than we have in Illinois.” But Radical Unionists and free blacks denounced the new regime and called on Congress to repudiate it, setting the stage for a battle in Washington over Reconstruction.
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IV

A
GROWING CONTROVERSY
over the army’s policies toward black laborers further complicated discussions of Reconstruction. Shortly after Lincoln decreed emancipation, the
New York Times
observed that “if the Proclamation makes the slaves actually free, there will come the further duty of making them work.” “This,” it added, “opens a vast and most difficult subject.”
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All Republicans agreed that free labor must replace slave, a conviction reinforced by the war. But many doubted that the freedpeople, having been reduced to a state of “infantile weakness and inexperience” by slavery, could be expected to compete immediately as free laborers. Such observers envisioned a prolonged period in which blacks, under federal oversight, would learn the rules and discipline of the market economy. Others believed that federal assistance created dependence; blacks, they insisted, had the same capacities and motives as white persons and would work efficiently if treated fairly and allowed to rise in the social scale. “What the freedman wants,” declared the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, “is education, instruction, and an opportunity to earn a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work.” “The whole subject,” noted the
Inquirer
, “is yet in its infancy.”
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In March 1863, the War Department, at the behest of Charles Sumner, created the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC) to suggest policies for dealing with the emancipated slaves. Its members—Samuel Gridley Howe, James McKaye, and Robert Dale Owen—were prominent reformers. Howe was an abolitionist and advocate of education for the blind; McKaye, part of Charles Sumner’s antislavery circle in Boston; and Owen, an advocate of women’s rights and the rights of labor. The commission took testimony from both races in the North and occupied South, sent questionnaires to the commanders of black troops, and pored over histories of abolition in the West Indies. It issued a preliminary report in June 1863 and a final one eleven months later. The commission’s recommendations, transmitted to Congress by Secretary of War Stanton and widely publicized in the North, illustrated the tension between the laissez-faire and interventionist approaches to the aftermath of slavery. The reports called for the creation of a Bureau of Emancipation to exercise benevolent guardianship over the freedpeople, but warned that it must not be a “permanent institution,” lest blacks fail to become self-reliant. They emphatically rejected the idea of apprenticeship, pointing to the disastrous results of that experiment in the West Indies, and concluded that the best way of protecting blacks’ rights was to grant them civil and political equality and the opportunity to purchase farms. McKaye went further, advocating the confiscation of the planters’ land and its redistribution to poor whites and former slaves, bringing about a thorough “social reconstruction of the Southern states.”
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Lincoln made no public comment on the AFIC reports. He had long insisted that blacks deserved the right to the fruits of their labor. In the Emancipation Proclamation he had urged the former slaves to go to work for reasonable wages. But, as Sumner pointed out, he did not “undertake to say how this opportunity shall be obtained” or how the freedpeople’s rights as free laborers would be protected.
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As the Union army occupied significant plantation regions and conflicts over control of black labor arose involving former slaves, former slaveholders, military commanders, and northern entrepreneurs, Lincoln was forced to begin confronting these crucial problems.

The Civil War witnessed a variety of experiments in free labor in the occupied South. The most highly publicized of these “rehearsals for Reconstruction” took place on the South Carolina Sea Islands, where reformers from the North established schools for blacks and tried to aid them in acquiring land, while northern investors put blacks to work as free laborers on abandoned plantations. Far more former slaves, however, were affected by labor policies implemented in the Mississippi Valley. Benjamin F. Butler had inaugurated this program in 1862, requiring blacks to labor on the estates of loyal planters, where they would receive wages according to a fixed schedule as well as food and medical care. In 1863, General Banks extended this system throughout occupied Louisiana. Banks saw it as “the first step in the transition from slave to free labor.” He banned corporal punishment and required that education be provided for black children, while also promising that the army would enforce “perfect subordination” on the part of the laborers. Many freedmen resented the year-long contracts they were required to sign, the low wages, and the rules forbidding laborers to leave plantations without the permission of their employers. They viewed the system as a disguised form of slavery.
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In 1863 Banks’s experiment was extended to the entire Mississippi Valley. Hoping to relieve the army of the expense and burden of supervising contraband camps and to secure Union control of the Mississippi Valley by settling a loyal population there, General Lorenzo Thomas decided to lease plantations to northerners and local planters who took Lincoln’s amnesty oath. Thomas’s system of compulsory free labor offered black men the choice of joining the army, working as military laborers, or signing plantation contracts. They could choose their employers, but once having done so they could not leave until the end of the year, or they would forfeit their wages.
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After numerous complaints of mistreatment of the freedpeople by unscrupulous lessees, the War and Treasury departments sent emissaries to investigate conditions in the Mississippi Valley. General James Wadsworth, dispatched by Stanton in October 1863, advocated settling blacks on plantations and arming them to help develop a “manly self-dependence.” He approved of the leasing system but insisted that wages should be high enough to enable blacks eventually to purchase their own farms. The “great danger,” he concluded, was “the tendency to establish a system of serfdom” in the name of supervised free labor. The reformer James Yeatman, sent by Secretary Chase, reported that blacks on leased plantations remained in “a state of involuntary servitude.” He urged the Treasury Department, which supervised abandoned lands, to establish a more humane program that would include some land distribution.
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In December 1863 Chase briefly took control of the labor system. New rules raised wages significantly and contemplated leasing the plantations directly to groups of blacks. But after an appeal from the army, Lincoln at the end of February restored military authority, giving General Thomas command of “the contraband and leasing business.” The Treasury plan, Lincoln wrote, “doubtless is well intended,” but he viewed it as unworkable. Because of constant disputes between employers and employees and Confederate raids that disrupted production, Thomas’s system did not work very well either. Indeed, the most successful freedmen in the Mississippi Valley were the small number of “independent Negro cultivators,” especially those at Davis Bend, the site of plantations owned by Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph, where the land was leased to freedmen to work as they saw fit.
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The administration, in Stanton’s words, lacked a “well defined system” for dealing with the transition to free labor. But Lincoln, despite remaining far more concerned with the military situation and securing emancipation, expressed increasing interest in how the experiments fared. In February 1862, when he met with Edward L. Pierce, who had traveled to the Sea Islands and written articles about conditions there for the northern press, Lincoln listened for a few moments and then said he “did not think he ought to be bothered with such details.” A year and a half later, however, when he met with John Eaton, whom Grant had sent to Washington to describe his policies for dealing with the former slaves, Lincoln’s attitude had changed. He questioned Eaton closely “in regard to those who were coming into our lines: What was their object; how far did they understand the changes that were coming to them, and what were they able to do for themselves?”
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Occasionally, Lincoln took steps toward assisting former slaves in acquiring land. Preparations were under way at Port Royal, South Carolina, to auction land seized by the army for nonpayment of a direct tax Congress had imposed in 1862. In September 1863, and again in December, Lincoln directed that plots of land be set aside for preemption by black families at a price of $1.25 per acre, to give them “an interest in the soil.” The plantation system would be destroyed, declared the
Washington Morning Chronicle
, and the “heir of the lash” would become a landowner, thus “assimilat[ing] our institutions to the noble doctrine of Freedom.” The commissioners in charge of the sales, however, refused to carry out Lincoln’s orders. One described the idea of allocating land to blacks as “a wild scheme, that out-radicals all the radicalism I ever heard of.” “Sharp sighted speculators” from the North also objected. They persuaded Secretary of the Treasury Chase, who oversaw the land sales, to amend the instructions. When the auction took place in February 1864, some black families acquired farms, but most of the land ended up in the hands of army officers and northern investors.
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The Sea Islands, where no native white population remained to conciliate, was a special case. Elsewhere, Lincoln feared that talk of land redistribution would undermine efforts to win southern white support. His Reconstruction and amnesty plan had offered restoration of “all rights of property,” other than slaves, to Confederates who took the oath of loyalty. In February 1864 he directed the acting attorney general to exempt from the operation of the two confiscation acts southerners who did so.
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By 1864, with support for gradual emancipation and apprenticeship fading, Lincoln was moving toward the idea (anticipated in the Emancipation Proclamation) that former slaves should immediately go to work as free laborers under equitable conditions. That January he responded to an inquiry from Arkansas by writing that he would view “with great favor” a situation in which plantation owners accepted emancipation and hired their former slaves to “re-commence…cultivation…by fair contracts.” He would treat the freedpeople, he added, “precisely as I would treat the same number of free white people in the same relation and condition.” Such a step toward instituting “the free-labor system,” Lincoln continued, would help to secure the twin aims of the war: to “advance freedom, and restore peace and prosperity.”
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