The Fiery Trial (52 page)

These debates revealed significant differences in Republicans’ approach to Reconstruction. Lincoln saw Reconstruction primarily as an adjunct of the war effort—a way of undermining the Confederacy, rallying southern white Unionists, and securing emancipation. Radicals believed Reconstruction should be postponed until after the war (as the Wade-Davis Bill clearly envisioned in the requirement that a majority of whites take an oath of loyalty) and that the federal government should attempt to ensure basic justice to the emancipated slaves. At this point, equality before the law, not black suffrage, was the key issue for most congressional Republicans. But some already wondered whether truly loyal governments could be established without black votes, given that, as the Massachusetts Radical George Boutwell pointed out, in many parts of the South the freedmen “are almost the only people who are trustworthy supporters of the Union.” “The whole subject of Reconstruction is beset with difficulty,” Secretary of the Navy Welles noted in his diary. But the immediate task for Republicans was the coming presidential campaign.
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II

T
HE MILITARY SITUATION
cast a dark shadow over Lincoln’s prospects for reelection. In May 1864, Ulysses S. Grant, who had been brought east to take command of the Army of the Potomac, launched an assault against Robert E. Lee’s forces in Virginia. Rather than limiting the campaign to a few days of combat as his predecessors in the eastern theater did, Grant was determined to keep pressure on the Confederate army. Every day saw bloody engagements. After a month of fighting, Grant’s casualties numbered more than 40,000, almost the size of Lee’s army. Eventually, Grant broke off contact and headed for Petersburg, the rail junction south of Richmond. Lee got there first, and Grant began a siege. Meanwhile, Nathaniel P. Banks failed in an effort to bring the Red River valley in Louisiana under Union control, and William T. Sherman seemed to be making little progress as his army moved out of Tennessee toward Atlanta. Early in July, a Confederate division under Jubal Early reached the outskirts of Washington, further reinforcing the sense that the war was not being won. A week later, Lincoln issued a call for 500,000 additional troops.
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“No man,” declared
Harper’s Weekly
, “will complain that we are not now making war in earnest.” But much of the northern public saw no need for bloodshed of such magnitude, especially with victory nowhere in sight. The result was a crisis of morale and a growing clamor for peace. Even Martin F. Conway, the congressional Radical who had excoriated Lincoln for failing to pursue the war more vigorously, now begged him, “For god’s sake try and arrange [peace] with the South, on any basis short of their resumption of federal power on the cornerstone of slavery…. The war-spirit is gone.”
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Almost from the beginning of the war, what the
New York Herald
called “amateur peace negotiators” had sought to bring an end to the conflict. In May 1863, James F. Jaquess, an army chaplain from Illinois, persuaded Lincoln to authorize him to travel to Richmond in the hope of arranging terms of reunion. Two months later, Lincoln approved a letter written by James R. Gilmore, publisher of the
Continental Review
, to Zebulon Vance, the governor of North Carolina, proposing “a reunion of all the States on the basis of the abolition of slavery…and the full reinstatement of every Confederate citizen in all the rights of citizenship.”
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Nothing came of these initiatives. But early in July 1864, with a sense of desperation over the course of the war taking hold in the North, the mercurial Horace Greeley informed Lincoln that two Confederate emissaries “empowered to negotiate for peace” had arrived at the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. (In fact, there were three, and they had been instructed to “harass the Northern government in every possible way” and do what they could to encourage peace sentiment in view of the coming northern election.) Greeley proposed his own “plan of adjustment”: the restoration of the Union, the abolition of slavery, amnesty to all Confederates, $400 million in compensation to slaveowners, representation in Congress based on total population (which would increase southern political power, since the entire former slave population would now be counted rather than three-fifths), and a national convention to propose changes in the Constitution. Surely realizing that nothing would come of the initiative but not wanting to seem averse to peace, Lincoln designated Greeley to travel to Canada to meet the emissaries. On July 18, Lincoln sent Greeley a letter, addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” offering to receive “any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery.” When Greeley presented the letter, the commissioners issued a public statement expressing “profound regret” that Lincoln had proposed terms the Confederacy could never accept.
³³

While these events were transpiring, Jaquess and Gilmore traveled to Richmond, where they met with Jefferson Davis to present peace terms approved by Lincoln. These closely followed Greeley’s proposals with one alteration: the number of congressmen would be based not on the total population of a state but on the number of voters, presenting the South with the choice of seeing its congressional representation reduced or allowing black men to vote. (In somewhat different form, the Fourteenth Amendment passed by Congress in 1866 would also offer the southern states this choice.) Gilmore later claimed that Lincoln approved of the mission in order to demonstrate the impossibility of a negotiated peace. If this was Lincoln’s aim, Davis obliged. He indignantly told the emissaries that the war would continue until the Union acknowledged “our right to self-government.”
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Lincoln felt vindicated. But Democrats seized on the To Whom It May Concern letter to argue that the only thing preventing peace was Lincoln’s unwillingness to withdraw the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln, charged the
New York World
, preferred to “continue a war for the abolition of slavery rather than entertain a proposition for the return of the seceded states with their old rights.” Of course, neither the Confederate agents nor Davis had made any such proposal. But many Republicans feared that Lincoln’s prospects for reelection had been seriously damaged. The president, wrote the
New York Times
, should have insisted only on the restoration of the Union, leaving every other question, including the fate of slavery, “open to discussion” once the war ended. Meanwhile, Greeley continued to badger Lincoln to take steps to “stop this useless carnage.”
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As July gave way to August, northern morale sank to its lowest level of the war. Calls for Lincoln to step down in favor of another candidate proliferated. “Lincoln’s election is beyond any possible hope,” his old Illinois friend Leonard Swett wrote to his wife. Pressure on Lincoln to modify his position on peace negotiations mounted. On August 16, 1864, two Republican leaders from Wisconsin, former governor Alexander Randall and Judge Joseph T. Mills, visited the White House and delivered a letter from the prowar Democrat Charles D. Robinson complaining that Lincoln’s declaration that there could be no peace without abolition “puts the whole war question on a new basis, and takes us War Democrats clear off our feet, leaving us no ground to stand on.”
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These developments forced Lincoln to clarify his own thinking on the relationship of emancipation to the war effort. He drafted a sharp reply to Robinson, outlining the moral and practical reasons why he could not go back on the proclamation. He linked abolition directly to the recruitment of black soldiers:

Yet at the end of this letter, Lincoln added, “If Jefferson Davis wishes…to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.”
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This seems to have been an attempt to shift the burden of prolonging the war to Davis, rather than truly opening the door to a retreat from emancipation. When Lincoln showed the draft to Randall and Mills on August 19, he made clear his exasperation with those urging him to change course. The war was for the Union, Lincoln said, but “no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done.” Were he to return black soldiers to slavery, “I should be damned in time and eternity.”
³⁸

That same day, Lincoln also read the draft letter to Frederick Douglass, whom he had invited to the White House. Douglass urged Lincoln not to send it. He objected strongly to the final sentence, warning that it “would be given a broader meaning than you intend to convey” and be taken as “a complete surrender of your antislavery policy.” Lincoln’s main purpose in initiating this meeting, however, was to seek Douglass’s advice on how to increase the number of blacks who, in the event that he lost the election, could not be returned to bondage. Slaves, Lincoln said, were not coming into Union lines as quickly as he hoped. He asked Douglass to devise a plan to send black “scouts” behind Confederate lines to spread news of the Emancipation Proclamation and encourage slaves to escape—a kind of official institutionalization of the prewar Underground Railroad. A few days after their meeting, Douglass forwarded to Lincoln a proposal for putting into effect the president’s remarkable idea, although nothing came of it as the military and political situation shortly turned more favorable. Soon after their meeting, Douglass wrote that on this occasion, Lincoln “showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.” Yet Douglass found alarming Lincoln’s apparent belief that to be free when the war ended, slaves must have come within Union lines.
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Lincoln decided not to send the letter to Robinson. But demands for a change of policy continued to mount. On August 22 the Republican National Committee, meeting in New York, concluded that Lincoln could not be reelected. They dispatched Henry J. Raymond to Washington to urge the president to send a peace commissioner to Richmond to propose an end to the war on the “sole condition” of reunion. Raymond assured Lincoln that this would involve “no sacrifice of consistency” and would be a shrewd political move. Jefferson Davis would reject any such overture, thus dispelling “all the delusions about peace that prevail in the North.”
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Lincoln was convinced he faced defeat. He asked his cabinet to affix their signatures to an envelope containing a document whose contents remained hidden. Only after his reelection did he reveal what they had signed:

The “blind memorandum” did not mention slavery; it could be interpreted as envisioning a situation in which emancipation might be sacrificed to save the Union. On August 24, 1864, the day after the cabinet signed it, Lincoln composed a letter authorizing Raymond to proceed to Richmond to propose “that upon the restoration of the Union and the national authority, the war shall cease at once, all remaining questions to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes.” Were this rejected, Raymond should ascertain “what terms of peace” the Confederacy would accept. The following day, Lincoln discussed the draft letter with Raymond, Senator William P. Fessenden, and Secretaries Seward and Stanton. Overnight, it appears, Lincoln had changed his mind. He and the others agreed that the Raymond mission should not go forward; it would amount to an “ignominious” surrender, “worse than losing the Presidential contest.” Thus, after a moment of hesitation, Lincoln reaffirmed the transformation that had taken place in the character and purpose of the Civil War. Begun as a means of preserving the Union, the war, as Seward put it, had evolved into “a popular revolution against African slavery.” Emancipation had become an end in itself, which Lincoln would not abandon even if it meant risking his own reelection.
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The painful events of August 1864 forced Lincoln to define with greater precision his understanding of the scope and permanence of the Emancipation Proclamation. He had always worried about its constitutionality and what would happen to it when the war ended. The quest to make emancipation more secure helps to explain why he pressed in 1863 and 1864 for the writing of new state constitutions that abolished slavery and why he eventually came to support abolition by constitutional amendment. As the
New York Times
noted, while the Emancipation Proclamation had “set free” all the slaves in areas in rebellion, many had not yet been “
made
free.” Lincoln made a similar distinction. He had always insisted that black soldiers could not be reenslaved. He had announced that he would not “return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress,” by which he seemed to mean those who had actually enjoyed freedom within Union lines. He assumed that such persons would remain free even if the Democrats won the coming election, which is why he asked Douglass to devise a means of increasing their number.