The Fiery Trial (51 page)

Clearly, Republicans had not arrived at a consensus about the status of blacks in the postwar world. Their differences affected how they viewed the upcoming election. No sitting president had run for reelection since Martin Van Buren in 1840; none had won a second term since Andrew Jackson. Many Republicans seemed uneasy about the prospect of a second Lincoln administration. “You would be surprised in talking with public men,” Lyman Trumbull wrote in February 1864, “to find how few when you come to get at their real sentiments are for Mr. Lincoln’s reelection. There is a distrust and fear that he is too undecided and inefficient ever to put down the rebellion.” Some Republicans suspected that Lincoln was not fully committed to ending slavery. “His emancipation,” charged Martin F. Conway, the Radical congressman from Kansas, “is that of Henry Clay,…gradual and ‘compensatory,’” unsuited to the “new world” the war had brought into being. The moderate John Sherman told the Senate that Lincoln had acted only after the country “became wearied” by his reluctance to move against slavery.
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To be sure, Lincoln enjoyed deep support among the Republican rank and file. “The people desire the reelection of Mr. Lincoln,” wrote James A. Garfield, now serving as a member of Congress from Ohio. The
New York Times
castigated the president’s critics as “monomaniacs” who thought patriotism meant “devotion to the negro.” Some Radicals strongly defended Lincoln’s antislavery credentials. In a long address in January 1864, Isaac N. Arnold cited the House Divided speech to demonstrate that one of the “great objects” of Lincoln’s life had always been to “eradicate slavery.” “He is a radical,” Arnold insisted, claiming that Lincoln had “exerted a greater influence…in forming public opinion” than any other person: “His speeches and writings, plain, homely, and unpolished as they sometimes are, have become the household words of the people, and crystallized into the overwhelming public sentiment which demands the extinction of slavery.” Owen Lovejoy also spoke up on Lincoln’s behalf. When Lovejoy died in March 1864, Lincoln remarked, “I have lost the best friend I had in the House.”
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Lincoln’s critics found it difficult to settle on an alternative candidate. For at least a year, Salmon P. Chase had been using Treasury Department patronage appointments to build support for an effort to replace Lincoln as the Republican nominee. Chase was notorious for ambition and self-regard, but these qualities had not led him to compromise his commitment to black suffrage, and some Radicals saw him as more likely to implement a racially egalitarian Reconstruction policy than Lincoln. Chase’s candidacy, however, collapsed in February when Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas circulated an intemperate manifesto calling for Lincoln to be replaced at the head of the ticket. Lincoln’s renomination, Pomeroy wrote, would undermine “the cause of human liberty, and the dignity and honor of the nation.” Republican reaction was so negative that Chase announced that he would not seek the presidency.
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As always, Lincoln sought to keep the party united behind him. In an effort to explain the evolution of his policy toward slavery and burnish his antislavery credentials while retaining support from conservatives, Lincoln in April 1864 issued another of his influential public letters. This one was addressed to Albert G. Hodges, a Kentucky newspaper editor and delegate to the upcoming Republican National Convention. Lincoln, in essence, reiterated the position he had taken in his 1862 letter to Horace Greeley about the primacy of preserving the Union and the distinction between his public responsibilities and his personal hatred of slavery:

The Hodges letter helped to solidify Lincoln’s support. Some Radicals, however, continued to hope for a new nominee. At the end of May 1864, an aggregation of Radicals, War Democrats, and others estranged from the administration gathered at Cleveland and nominated John C. Frémont for president. Their platform called for a constitutional amendment not only abolishing slavery but also establishing “absolute equality before the law,” although it avoided mention of black suffrage. It also advocated the confiscation of Confederates’ land and its redistribution to soldiers and former slaves. This last plank was the only one to cause dissension in the platform committee, and Frémont quickly repudiated it.
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Among those who participated in the Frémont movement were Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, both of whom dispatched letters to Cleveland. Phillips condemned Lincoln’s Reconstruction policy, which “puts all power into the hands of the unchanged white race [and] makes the freedom of the negro a sham.” His course was quite a departure for a man who had previously insisted that abolitionists should remain aloof from electoral campaigns and concentrate on changing public opinion. As one commentator reminded Phillips, his influence rested on his “absolute independence of politics…. I think you sacrifice your position, the moment you pronounce decisively for any man as president.”
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Assembling a week before the national convention of the Union party (as the Republicans had rechristened themselves to attract Democrats) was to meet in Baltimore, the Cleveland gathering had little chance of derailing Lincoln’s nomination. Most Radical Republicans remained aloof from the Frémont movement. The
Chicago Tribune
, Lincoln’s frequent critic, called the convention “the protracted and noisy travail of a few hundred malcontents.” Sumner, the Senate’s leading advocate of black rights, did not endorse Frémont, partly because of his close personal relationship with Lincoln and his wife. Nor did Thaddeus Stevens, the most outspoken Radical in the House.
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Nonetheless, the prospect of a split in the party posed a serious problem for Lincoln’s reelection campaign. No doubt as a response to Frémont’s nomination, Lincoln directed Senator Edwin Morgan, chair of the National Union Executive Committee, to make a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery the “key note” of his speech opening the national convention. Morgan did so, and the platform included a plank demanding the “utter and complete extirpation” of slavery via such an amendment. “Tremendous applause” greeted the reading of this provision. The platform went on to demand the “unconditional surrender” of the Confederacy and singled out for praise the Emancipation Proclamation and enlistment of black soldiers. It said nothing about the divisive issue of Reconstruction and avoided the question of equality before the law for blacks other than soldiers, who, it proclaimed, were entitled to the protection of the laws of war “without regard to distinction of color.” In his letter accepting the nomination, Lincoln for the first time called for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, describing it as “a fitting, and necessary conclusion” to the war effort that would make permanent the joining of the causes of “Liberty and Union.”
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Lincoln’s nomination was a foregone conclusion, but two other questions aroused controversy at the convention: the seating of contested delegations and the choice of vice president. Predictably, rival delegations presented themselves from Missouri. The convention voted overwhelmingly to seat the Radicals, demonstrating how thoroughly the Blairs’ racist screeds had alienated mainstream Republicans. The twenty-two Missouri delegates then proceeded to cast their votes for General Grant, the only departure from unanimity in Lincoln’s renomination. Delegations also presented themselves from six Confederate states. Some Republicans welcomed them as harbingers of their party’s future extension into the South. But critics of Lincoln’s wartime Reconstruction policy claimed that no legitimate loyal governments existed in these states. By a two-to-one margin, the convention admitted the delegations from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee as full members, and those from Virginia and Florida as nonvoting participants. It refused recognition to a biracial group from Beaufort, South Carolina (a state, like Florida, where no loyal government had been established), that included the black naval hero Robert Smalls.
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To the surprise of many observers, the delegates jettisoned Vice President Hannibal Hamlin and in his place nominated Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee. Lincoln made no public comment on the vice presidency before the convention and instructed John Hay, who attended the meeting, “not to interfere about V. P.” Had Lincoln worked behind the scenes for Johnson’s nomination? It is certain that if he had expressed a desire to retain Hamlin on the ticket the convention would have obliged. Hamlin, however, did not expect to be renominated. His office, he later remarked, was a “nullity,” and he had played no role whatever in decision making. More to the point, many Republicans believed that a War Democrat would add strength to the ticket, and Johnson had the added advantage that he was the country’s most prominent southern Unionist. When the balloting began, the Massachusetts delegation executed an unexpected gambit. It pushed for the War Democrat Daniel Dickinson of New York, hoping that Hamlin (who lived in Maine) would return to the Senate, replacing the conservative William P. Fessenden, and that the election of Dickinson would force Secretary of State Seward to resign, since two top offices could not be held by persons from the same state. Whereupon Thurlow Weed, to protect Seward, swung the New York delegation to Johnson and other states followed.
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This maneuvering should not obscure Johnson’s widespread popularity in Republican ranks. All wings of the party admired his “splendid stand against secession.” As early as February 1864, the
Chicago Tribune
had reported that “a large and influential party in the Union ranks” favored Johnson as Lincoln’s running mate. In any event, most Republicans considered the vice presidential nomination “of comparatively little moment.” Time would reveal this to be a tragic error. “I did think it was good policy to place some one living in a southern state—who had been true—on the ticket and favored Johnson,” wrote John D. Defrees of Indiana in 1866, after Johnson had unexpectedly become president. “For which the Lord forgive me.”
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William Lloyd Garrison, who attended the Union convention, was delighted by the enthusiasm with which the delegates greeted speeches denouncing slavery. After the gathering adjourned he headed to Washington, where he had an hour-long meeting at the White House. He left convinced of Lincoln’s “desire to do all that he can…to uproot slavery.” Departing from his previous conduct as fully as Phillips, Garrison endorsed Lincoln’s reelection as essential to securing abolition. But if the delegates thought that the Baltimore convention would restore party harmony, events soon proved them wrong. The debate over admitting delegates from the southern states was a precursor to further Republican divisions over Reconstruction. Indeed, shortly after the convention seated the Arkansas delegation, Congress refused to admit senators and representatives who had been elected from that state, declaring the government Lincoln recognized there illegitimate. Lincoln instructed the local military commander to support it anyway.
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As noted in the previous chapter, Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan, announced in December 1863, had initially won support from all parts of the Republican party. But the racism openly expressed by members of the Louisiana constitutional convention in the spring of 1864, and disturbing reports about the treatment of black laborers in the state, raised concerns in Washington, as did the visit of the black emissaries from New Orleans requesting the right to vote. The Reconstruction question languished for a time as Congress concentrated on the Thirteenth Amendment and other matters. But on the eve of adjournment in July 1864, Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill, a repudiation of Lincoln’s course regarding Reconstruction. The bill proposed to delay the start of Reconstruction until a majority, not 10 percent, of a state’s white males had taken an oath to support the Constitution. Only then could elections take place for a constitutional convention, with suffrage limited to white southerners who could take the Ironclad Oath of past, as well as future, loyalty. (Benjamin F. Wade, who sponsored the measure along with Henry Winter Davis, favored black suffrage but said that to include it would “sacrifice the bill.”) Coming two weeks after the House rejected the Thirteenth Amendment, the Wade-Davis Bill also granted freedom to all slaves in the Confederacy, and contained guarantees for equality before the law for the freedmen under reconstructed southern governments.
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Viewing abolition by congressional enactment as unconstitutional and fearing that the bill would force him to repudiate the new regimes in Arkansas and Louisiana, Lincoln pocket vetoed it (allowed it to die by not signing it before Congress adjourned). Lincoln obviously felt strongly about the measure. He almost always went along with congressional enactments; this was one of only a handful of vetoes during his entire presidency and the only one of a bill of any significance. In his veto message, Lincoln called again for ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and added that he had no objection if any southern state voluntarily adopted the Wade-Davis plan, hardly a likely occurrence. If this was an effort at conciliation, it did not succeed. The bill’s authors issued a public statement accusing Lincoln of exercising “dictatorial usurpation” and of surreptitiously seeking to keep slavery alive despite the Emancipation Proclamation. Like the Pomeroy circular of the previous February, the Wade-Davis manifesto backfired; even Radical newspapers denounced it as “ill-tempered.” But this should not obscure the fact that the bill had won overwhelming support among congressional Republicans. Even moderates were convinced that Congress had a role to play in Reconstruction and desired “something more Radical” than Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan.
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