The Fiery Trial (56 page)

Hoping to bring the war to an immediate end, Lincoln met in Richmond on April 4 and 5 with John A. Campbell, a former justice of the Supreme Court and one of the emissaries who had taken part in the Hampton Roads conference. Campbell proposed that Lincoln allow Virginia’s Confederate legislature to convene in order to repeal the ordinance of secession and withdraw the state’s troops from southern armies, whereupon Lee would surrender. On April 6, Lincoln directed General Godfrey Weitzel to allow the lawmakers to assemble in Richmond for this purpose, also informing Grant about the action but adding, “I do not think it very probable that anything will come of this.” Lincoln also met with Francis H. Pierpont to assure him that he would continue to recognize the Restored Government of Virginia Pierpont headed. According to Pierpont’s later recollections, Lincoln asked questions rather than offering answers. How many Unionists really existed in the South? Would they join the Republican party? What would be the fate of the freedmen? If Pierpont is to be believed, Lincoln remarked that he “had no plan for reorganization.”
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On April 9, Grant accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Although the last Confederate force, Kirby Smith’s army in Texas, would not capitulate until May, the Civil War had ended. Shortly after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln revoked permission for the Confederate legislature of Virginia to convene, which the cabinet and Republican members of Congress who remained in Washington had unanimously opposed. To Lincoln’s annoyance, Campbell had interpreted his gesture as an invitation to negotiate an armistice and peace terms, including Virginia’s right to representation in Congress and “the condition of the slave population.” In any event, Lee’s surrender rendered the matter moot.
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Reconstruction now emerged as the foremost problem confronting the nation. On April 11, having returned to Washington, Lincoln delivered a speech on this subject to a large crowd that had gathered at the White House. According to one newspaper, he prepared it with “unusual care and deliberation.” In part, it was a defense of the new government of Louisiana, to whose support Lincoln had devoted so much effort. In the past month, events in that state had taken an ominous turn. On the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, Governor Michael Hahn resigned after being elected to the Senate and was replaced by J. Madison Wells, a Unionist planter who had owned more than 100 slaves before the Civil War. Quickly taking stock of the political situation as the war neared its end, Wells realized that Confederates who took an oath of loyalty, thus restoring their right to vote, would soon vastly outnumber white supporters of his regime. He promptly began replacing Hahn’s appointees in local and statewide offices with conservative Unionists and former rebels.
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In his speech, Lincoln acknowledged that the problem of Reconstruction was “fraught with great difficulty.” Nonetheless, he again sought to bolster northern support for the Louisiana regime, while also trying to find common ground with his Republican critics. In fact, Lincoln had asked Charles Sumner to stand on the White House balcony while he delivered the address. Lincoln noted that when he issued his Ten Percent Plan, every member of the cabinet had approved it and he had received “many commendations…and not a single objection to it, from any professed emancipationist.” (The next day, Chase wrote to Lincoln saying he had in fact objected to the exclusion of blacks from voting but admitted he had not done so strongly, not wanting to appear “pertinacious.”) Lincoln praised Louisiana’s accomplishments—the abolition of slavery, public education for both races, and the fact that abolition had been immediate, without an apprenticeship program of the kind he himself had once favored. However, he continued, it was “unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored men.” For the first time, Lincoln acknowledged that “the colored man…desires” the right to vote. He now repeated the sentiment of his private letter to Governor Hahn in 1864: “I would myself prefer that [the vote] were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” This was a remarkable statement. No American president had publicly endorsed even limited black suffrage. At this time only six northern states allowed black men to vote.
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What became known as his “last speech” (a description that, while factually accurate, suggests a finality scarcely anticipated when it was delivered) was in many ways typical of Lincoln. He urged Republicans to think of Reconstruction as a practical problem rather than a philosophical one. The question of whether the South was “in or out of the Union,” he said, was not only “practically immaterial” but downright “mischievous,” since all agreed that the seceded states were “out of their proper practical relation” to it. He insisted that the Louisiana regime should be supported, but denied being wedded to any “inflexible plan” for the other states. Even regarding Louisiana, he noted that “bad promises are better broken than kept,” suggesting that the process he had set in motion there might have to be modified or even abandoned. Lincoln closed by telling his audience to expect a “new announcement” regarding Reconstruction.

It was significant that Lincoln spoke of “reconstruction” and not “restoration,” as he had frequently done in the past. These terms carried very different implications. “Reconstruction,” one Democratic party leader observed around this time, “is synonymous with radicalism, restoration conservatism.” But if Lincoln expected the speech to quiet criticism of his course, he was disappointed. Lincoln, Sumner wrote to Chase, “had said some things better than any body else could have said them. But I fear his policy now.” Other Radicals were even more critical. It would be “wicked and blasphemous,” one wrote, “for us as a nation to allow any distinction of color whatever in the reconstructed states.” Even the moderate
New York Times
wondered what would prevent the southern states, if restored with their traditional rights intact, from abusing blacks? “The government cannot, without the worst dishonor, permit the bondage of the black man to be continued in any form,” it insisted.
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Many observers concluded from the speech that Lincoln remained undecided about Reconstruction. “Mr. Lincoln gropes…like a traveler in an unknown country without a map,” were the unkind words of the
New York World
. In fact, as a Washington reporter noted, most Republicans at this point had not yet “made up their minds” about Reconstruction. Even the
Chicago Tribune
, which favored black suffrage, acknowledged that under the Constitution, states had the right to set their own voting qualifications. One member of the audience, however, thought he understood exactly what Lincoln intended. “That means nigger citizenship,” the actor John Wilkes Booth is said to have remarked. Booth and a group of pro Confederate conspirators had been plotting to kidnap the president and demand the release of southern prisoners of war. “Now, by God,” Booth supposedly muttered, “I’ll put him through.”
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When the cabinet assembled on April 14, Lincoln noted that he had “perhaps been too fast in his desires for early reconstruction.” Before the meeting, he showed Attorney General James Speed a letter he had received from Chase urging the enfranchisement of all “loyal citizens” regardless of race when new state governments were formed. Speed thought Lincoln was moving toward the Radical position. “He [never] seemed so near our views,” Speed told Chase the next day. Lincoln now appeared to believe that the immediate problem was the prospect of anarchy in the South. He had directed Secretary of War Stanton to draw up a plan for interim military rule. Stanton presented to the cabinet a proposal to appoint a temporary military government for Virginia and North Carolina. Since his plan put off the establishment of civilian rule, he “left open” the question of whether blacks should vote. But Stanton’s proposal clearly implied that reliance on white Unionists might not be enough to establish loyal, stable governments. Little discussion ensued, and Lincoln urged his colleagues to devote their attention to “the great question now before us,” on which “we must soon begin to act.” Stanton was directed to redraft his proposal for consideration at the next cabinet meeting.
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That night, April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth mortally wounded Lincoln while he sat at Ford’s Theatre. He was carried to a house across the street, where his life slowly ebbed away. Before dawn, Secretary of the Navy Welles left Lincoln’s bedside and went outside. Already, mourners thronged the streets of Washington. “The colored people,” Welles wrote, “and there were at this time more of them perhaps than of whites, were painfully affected.” A little after seven in the morning, Lincoln died. His passing inspired an unprecedented outpouring of grief, and the first national funeral in the country’s history. Millions of men, women, and children viewed Lincoln’s casket as his remains made their way on a circuitous 1,700-mile journey from Washington to Springfield, with stops in more than 100 cities. It essentially retraced the route Lincoln had taken in February 1861 on the way to his inauguration. Reading the accounts of his funeral journey, one senses that Americans recognized that Lincoln’s experience during the war mirrored their own. For, as his bitter critic the
New York World
noted after his death, “some have changed more rapidly, some more slowly than he; but there are few of his countrymen, who have not changed at all.” Yet change was hardly total. When Lincoln’s body reached New York, the city council sought to prevent blacks from marching in the procession, only to be overruled by the War Department.
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Coupled with the achievements of piloting the United States through its greatest crisis and presiding over the emancipation of the slaves, the manner of his death ensured Lincoln’s place in the pantheon of the most revered American leaders. That the assassination occurred on Good Friday heightened the conviction that Lincoln had sacrificed himself to redeem a sinful nation. At the time of his death and for years thereafter, Lincoln was remembered primarily as the Great Emancipator. Not until the turn of the century, when the process of (white) reconciliation was far advanced, would Americans forget or suppress the centrality of slavery and emancipation to the war experience. Lincoln would then be transformed into a symbol of national unity, and the Gettysburg Address, which did not explicitly mention slavery, would, in popular memory, supplant the Emancipation Proclamation as the greatest embodiment of his ideas. More recently, we have returned to the insight Lincoln offered in the second inaugural: slavery was the war’s cause and emancipation its most profound outcome. To which may be added that these questions were central to Lincoln’s own rise to greatness.
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“W
ITH THE END OF THE WAR,”
wrote a northern editor in April 1865, “the real trial of our statesmanship, our patriotism, and our patience will begin.”
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No one knows what Lincoln would have done had he lived to complete his second term. As his last speech and final cabinet meeting demonstrated, Reconstruction policy was in flux when Lincoln died. Despite his determined support for the Louisiana regime, Lincoln had never been wedded to a single plan for Reconstruction. Different approaches had operated simultaneously in different parts of the South, all of them conceived as ways to weaken the Confederacy and secure the abolition of slavery rather than as fixed blueprints for the postwar South. None had been very successful. Lincoln had failed to bring a single reconstructed state back into the Union. The new governments he had initiated had not revealed a willingness to deal justly with the former slaves.

What we do know is that Lincoln was succeeded in office by a man who lacked all the qualities of greatness that he possessed. Lincoln was intellectually curious, willing to listen to criticism, attuned to the currents of northern public opinion, and desirous of getting along with Congress. Over the course of the war he had developed a deep sense of compassion for the slaves he had helped to liberate, and a concern for their fate—what the
New York Times
called, in commenting on the second inaugural, a “feeling for the bondmen and the sense of the great wrong done to them.”
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Andrew Johnson was self-absorbed, insensitive to the opinions of others, unwilling to compromise, and unalterably racist. If anyone was responsible for the downfall of his presidency it was Johnson himself. With Congress out of session until December 1865, Johnson took it upon himself to bring about Reconstruction, establishing new governments in the South in which blacks had no voice whatever. When these governments sought to reduce the freedpeople to a situation reminiscent of slavery, he refused to heed the rising tide of northern concern or to budge from his policy. As a result, Congress, after attempting to work with the president, felt it had no choice but to sweep aside Johnson’s Reconstruction plan and to enact some of the most momentous measures in American history: the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which accorded blacks equality before the law; the Fourteenth Amendment, which put the principle of equality unbounded by race into the Constitution; the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which mandated the establishment of new governments in the South with black men, for the first time in our history, enjoying a share of political power. Johnson did everything in his power to obstruct their implementation. In 1868, fed up with his intransigence and incompetence, the House of Representatives impeached Johnson and he came within one vote of conviction by the Senate.
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It is impossible to imagine Lincoln, had he lived, becoming so isolated from Congress, the Republican party, and the northern public as to be impeached and nearly removed from office. Nor does it seem likely that Lincoln would have implemented a policy and then clung to it in the face of its self-evident failure. Lincoln had changed enormously during the Civil War. Had he “considered it too humiliating to learn in advanced years,” one emancipated slave later wrote, “our race would yet have remained” in bondage. During Reconstruction, Lincoln’s ideas would undoubtedly have continued to evolve. This is why Frederick Douglass, his frequent critic, in 1865 called his death “an unspeakable calamity” for black America.
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