Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (86 page)

With such small Confederate forces left in the Carolinas, Grant’s impulse in December 1864 had been to pull Sherman and his army out of Georgia entirely and use the navy to transport them up to the James River, where they could reinforce Grant for a fresh assault on Petersburg in the spring. But Sherman demurred, insisting that he could accomplish much more by setting off on yet another raid, this time up into the Carolinas, where he could wreck the Army of Northern Virginia’s last rail lines and supply centers in the Carolinas. Sherman enlisted Halleck as an ally in his cause, and on December 18, Grant once more gave way to Sherman and authorized this new raid. After pausing to rest and refit in Savannah, Sherman and his army were again on the march. In their path was South Carolina, the state whose secession lay at the beginning of the war, and Sherman’s men were determined to make South Carolina suffer in retribution. “South Carolina cried out first for war,” one of Sherman’s Iowans swore, “and she shall have it to her hearts content. She sowed the Wind. She will soon reap the whirlwind.” Now Sherman’s men pillaged and burned without any regard for the needs of forage or food, leaving “a howling wilderness, an utter desolation,” behind them. On February 17 the state capital, Columbia, fell to Sherman, and that evening an immense fire blackened the central part of the city. Sherman was accused of having deliberately set the fire as a gesture of revenge, and though he denied the charge, he felt little sorrow over it. “Though I never ordered it and never wished it, I have never shed many tears over the event, because I believe it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the war.”
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Lincoln, too, had plans for the spring. One of them concerned emancipation. All of Lincoln’s actions to end slavery, including the Emancipation Proclamation itself, had been taken on the basis of his presidential war powers. And that created a problem at the point where the war ended. Strictly speaking, Lincoln had only emancipated slaves; he had not abolished the legal institution of slavery. It was, at least theoretically, possible that slavery could be reinstituted on the other side of the war in some new guise and with a different set of victims. Or it could emerge again from the border states, where the war powers he had used for the Emancipation Proclamation gave him no authority. And since the
Dred Scott
decision, banning the federal
government from interfering with slavery as legal property, still stood as the last word of the federal courts on the subject, the courts might lift no finger to prevent this from happening. In fact, a postwar legal challenge to the Emancipation Proclamation might very well undo even what the Proclamation had done. “The emancipation proclamation,” Lincoln told General Stephen Hurlbut in July 1863, is “I think … valid in law,” and he hoped it “will be so held by the courts.” But he could not be sure.

Only a constitutional amendment, forever outlawing slavery as an institution across the entire country, could absolutely secure the wartime gains made for emancipation. But amending the Constitution was a long reach. The Constitution had been amended only twelve times, and Lincoln himself, back in 1848, had counseled against “a habit of altering it. … New provisions, would introduce new difficulties, and thus create, and increase appetite for still further change.” The Radical Republicans in the Senate learned how much instinctive aversion there was to constitutional amendments when they adopted an abolition amendment in April 1864 only to see it fail, by a vote of 93 to 65, to obtain the necessary two-thirds majority needed in the House.
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But eventually Lincoln could see no other way to make black freedom tamperproof, and he insisted on making a thirteenth amendment part of the platform he ran upon in the 1864 election. On December 6, 1864, in his annual message to Congress, Lincoln urged Congress to take his reelection as a good moment for reconsidering the amendment, if only because the incoming Congress in December 1865 would likely do it anyway. “I venture to recommend the reconsideration and passage of the measure at the present session,” Lincoln reasoned. “The next Congress will pass the measure if this does not. Hence there is only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States for their action. And as it is to so go, at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better?”
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As renewed debate on the amendment began in the House on January 6, Lincoln buttonholed former Whigs and Democrats to bring them into line (among the political horse trading he performed was the promise to New York Democrat of a plum patronage position in exchange for his vote). “You and I were old Whigs, both of us followers of that great statesman, Henry Clay,” Lincoln said as he oiled the cooperation of James Rollins, a Missouri congressman. “I have sent for you as an old Whig friend to come and see me, that I might make an appeal to you to vote for this amendment. It is going to be very close; a few votes one way or the other will decide it.” He was even more blunt with two other fence-sitters, who were frankly informed that they should “remember that I am President of the United States, clothed with immense power, and I expect you to procure those votes.” He was not wrong in his
anxiety. When the House roll was called on January 31, 1865, the proposed amendment squeaked through the House with just three votes to spare, 119 to 56. But it was done. “I wish you could have been here the day that the constitutional amendment was passed forever abolishing slavery in the United States,” wrote Charles Douglass from Washington to his father, Frederick Douglass, “Such rejoicing I never before witnessed, cannons firing, people hugging and shaking hands, white people, I mean, flags flying. … I tell you things are progressing finely. …” Lincoln’s own Illinois, appropriately, was the first state to ratify the new amendment, followed by Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
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It was less clear-cut who was winning on the subject of Reconstruction. Lincoln was prepared to push forward with his 10 percent plan for Reconstruction in Louisiana, but the Radicals remained reluctant to endorse any template that did not clearly overturn the old racial and economic order of the agrarian South. Lincoln was far from blind to the faults of his plan. But he was eager to first bring as many of the former rebel states into Reconstruction as fast as they could be gotten there, and then worry about opening the ears of Southerners to his hints to include emancipation and black civil rights as part of their new constitutions.

Lincoln’s admirers, then and now, have been inclined to ascribe this to Lincoln’s generosity and desire to end the war on a note of forgiveness. That certainly seemed to be the message Lincoln had for the country when he stood on the Capitol steps on a blustery March 4 to take his second oath of office as president. In the brief address he gave before taking the oath, Lincoln reviewed the fundamental causes of the war—slavery, … the demand for slavery’s extension westward into the territories, and … the idea that the Constitution permitted secession from the Union when those demands were not met. But he also took the opportunity of this review to set these immediate causes of war in the context of a larger metaphysical, almost theological question. Lincoln looked beyond the material causes of the war and urged Northerners and Southerners alike to think of it (as John Brown had prophesied before his execution in 1859) as a judgment by God on a crime that the whole nation, not just one section, had been guilty of.

Perhaps, Lincoln speculated, the war ultimately was not about secession or slavery but about the mysteries of divine providence and moral judgment. In this life, the Bible told him that offenses are unavoidable, and slavery had certainly been an offense. Slavery had grown up from the first in America without anyone’s particular bidding, and in spite of the best intentions of the Founders. But like sinners in the hands of an angry God, not even those who had merely inherited such offenses have the right to plead inability and innocence. “If we shall suppose that American Slavery
is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came,” Lincoln asked, “shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to him?”
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But if the time had now come, at whatever the cost, to rip up slavery by the roots, then human beings could only bow their heads to that cost as the price of a national life in which “offences must needs come.” Perhaps it would be only justice, Lincoln said, that “all the wealth piled up by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” and “every drop of blood drawn with the lash” shall now “be paid by another drawn with the sword.” These words were bound to surprise and enrage those who thought of themselves as the righteous, who had suffered innocently from the depravity of the “slave power.” But they could protest all they liked; their argument would not be with Lincoln. “As it was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’” Americans must not waste their energies now in judgment—that belonged to the inscrutable God who moved all things in such mysterious ways—but in the one exercise that still was within their grasp, that of mercy.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Eloquent as these words were as religious philosophy, they were also read as a promise of a speedy and painless Reconstruction. Certainly speed was part of Lincoln’s Reconstruction agenda. After four years of war, Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment by the slimmest of margins, and efforts by the Radicals to promote a Reconstruction bill in Congress guaranteeing the freed slaves the right to vote had died on the floor. Allowing Reconstruction to proceed under the single eye of the executive branch might get better, faster, less ambiguous results than with all the cooks in Congress stirring the pot. A month after the inaugural, Lincoln once again called on Louisianans (whose state was furthest along the road to Reconstruction) to open “the elective franchise” to the “very intelligent” among African Americans and “those who serve our cause as soldiers.” His appointment of Salmon Chase as Taney’s successor on the Supreme Court was also a direct way of dealing with the threat of postwar legal appeals from the war’s military results. “Judge
Chase would only be sustaining himself … as regarded the emancipation policy of the government,” Lincoln remarked to a newspaper correspondent, and added to George Boutwell, “We want a man who will sustain the Legal Tender Act and the Proclamation of Emancipation.”
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Keeping the cards securely in his own hands was uppermost in his mind when at the end of March 1865 Lincoln came down to the James River to confer with Grant and with Sherman, who had come up from the Carolina coast by steamer for the meeting. There, Lincoln talked to his premier generals about the kind of terms he wanted given to the South and its armies if and when they surrendered. He advised them to offer whatever they thought would induce surrender of the Confederate armies as a whole, since it would be better to let them give up their arms as organized groups rather than pressing the Confederates so hard that they broke up into innumerable guerilla bands. He expressed the hope that Jefferson Davis could be allowed to escape the country, rather than running the risk of a sensational treason trial, and Sherman remembered Lincoln suggesting that the generals might even offer to recognize the existing rebel state governments, especially in North Carolina, as an inducement to surrender “till Congress could provide others.” And since Congress had now adjourned (and with the new Congress elected in November not scheduled to assemble until December 1865), Lincoln had a free hand to end the war, resuscitate the Southern state governments, and move them toward black civil rights without Congress encumbering or endangering the process.
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This did not mean, however, that Lincoln was willing to grant the Confederates any kind of blank check. Lincoln had been willing, as early as mid-1863, to allow friends and intercessors to open up secret negotiations with Richmond, but only on terms Jefferson Davis at once rejected. As late as February 1865 Lincoln himself came down to Hampton Roads to meet with a Confederate peace commission headed by his old friend Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president. Lincoln offered to swap $400 million in United States bonds if the Confederate states would rejoin the Union and adopt the Thirteenth Amendment prospectively, with the understanding that it would be gradually phased in over a period of—as Stephens later claimed Lincoln said—five years. But the negotiations foundered on Lincoln’s insistence that the Confederate states abandon all claim to treat with the
United States as a separate government, and the Hampton Roads conference in particular turned up empty after Jefferson Davis dismissed any form of surrender.
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Lincoln even went so far, after his meeting with Grant and Sherman, as to authorize members of the Virginia legislature to assemble as a Union government—but only if they understood that there would be “no receding by the Executive of the United States on the slavery question.” And then, after reflecting on the inadequacies of this proposal, Lincoln cancelled it a week later. He wanted peace, and he wanted it done quickly enough that he could supervise it. But he would brook Southern foot-dragging on Reconstruction no more than he would welcome Radical meddling.
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Sherman, and possibly Grant as well, mistook Lincoln’s desire for the fastest Union solution to peace as a desire for any solution so long as it was fast, and as a result, both Grant and Sherman came away from their meeting with the president in possession of a certainty about Lincoln’s easygoing intentions that Lincoln himself did not entirely share. Neither Grant nor Sherman could have realized how quickly they were going to have to deal in hard terms with that uncertainty, since almost all of their generals believed that at least one more major battle in Virginia would probably have to be fought. “The great fight may yet be fought out in this vicinity,” George Meade warned in March. That apprehension was not necessarily misplaced, either, since Lee staged a breakout attempt from the Petersburg lines on March 25, lunging toward Fort Stedman, on the far right of Grant’s lines.
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