Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (168 page)

19
.
CWL
, VIII, 149.

20
. Christopher Dell,
Lincoln and the War Democrats
(Rutherford, N.J., 1975), 290; Anson Herrick of New York in
CG
, 38 Cong., 2 Sess., 525—25; Samuel S. Cox quoted in Joel H. Silbey, A
Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era
, 1860–1868 (New York, 1977), 183.

21
. James G. Randall and Richard N. Current,
Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure
(New York, 1955), 307–13; La Wanda Cox and John H. Cox,
Politics, Principle, and Prejudice
1865–1866:
Dilemma of Reconstruction America
(New York, 1963), 1–30.

wrote a Republican congressman in his diary. "Members joined in the shouting and kept it up for some minutes. Some embraced one another, others wept like children. I have felt, ever since the vote, as if I were in a new country." By acclamation the House voted to adjourn for the rest of the day "in honor of this immortal and sublime event."
²²

The Thirteenth Amendment sped quickly through Republican state legislatures that were in session; within a week eight states had ratified it and during the next two months another eleven did so. Ratification by five additional northern states was certain as soon as their legislatures met. Of the Union states only those carried by McClellan in the presidential election—New Jersey, Kentucky, and Delaware—held out.
²³
The "reconstructed" states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee ratified readily. Since the Lincoln administration had fought the war on the theory that states could not secede, it considered ratification by three-quarters of
all
the states including those in the Confederacy to be necessary. One of the first tasks of reconstruction would be to obtain the ratification of at least three more ex-Confederate states to place the Amendment in the Constitution.

Among the spectators who cheered and wept for joy when the House passed the 13th Amendment were many black people. Their presence was a visible symbol of the revolutionary changes signified by the Amendment, for until 1864 Negroes had not been allowed in congressional galleries. Blacks were also admitted to White House social functions for the first time in 1865, and Lincoln went out of his way to welcome Frederick Douglass to the inaugural reception on March 4. Congress and northern states enacted legislation that began to break down the pattern of second-class citizenship for northern Negroes: admission of black witnesses to federal courts; repeal of an old law that barred blacks from carrying mail; prohibition of segregation on streetcars in the District of Columbia; repeal of black laws in several northern states that had imposed certain kinds of discrimination against Negroes or barred their entry into the state; and steps to submit referendums to the voters of several states to grant the ballot to blacks (none of these referendums passed until 1868).

Perhaps the most dramatic symbol of change occurred on February

22
. "George W. Julian's Journal,"
Indiana Magazine of History
, 11 (1915), 327;
CG
, 38 Cong., 2 Sess., 531.

23
. New Jersey ratified the Amendment in 1866 after Republicans gained control of the legislature.

1, the day after House passage of the 13th Amendment. On that day Senator Charles Sumner presented Boston lawyer John Rock for admission to practice before the Supreme Court, and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase swore him in. There was nothing unusual in this except that Rock was a black man, the first Negro accredited to the highest Court which eight years earlier had denied U.S. citizenship to his race. The Court had been virtually reconstructed by Lincoln's appointment of five new justices including Chase. The transition from Roger Taney to Chase as leader of the Court was itself the most sweeping judicial metamorphosis in American history.
²⁴

Important questions concerning emancipation and reconstruction were sure to come before this new Court. Two such questions might well grow out of actions taken in the area of freedmen's affairs during the winter of 1864–65. Thousands of contrabands had attached themselves to Sherman's army on its march from Atlanta to the sea. Reports filtered northward of Sherman's indifference to their welfare and ill-treatment of them by some officers and men. To sort out the rumors and problems, Secretary of War Stanton journeyed to Savannah in January for a talk with Sherman and an interview with black leaders, most of them former slaves. Among the questions Stanton asked these men was how best they could support their families in freedom. "The way we can best take care of ourselves," they answered, "is to have land, and turn in and till it by our labor. . . . We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it, and make it our own."
²⁵

Stanton and Sherman thought this a good idea, so the conservative general prepared the most radical field order of the war. Issued January 16, Sherman's "Special Field Orders, No. 15" designated the sea islands and the rich plantation areas bordering rivers for thirty miles inland from Charleston down to Jacksonville for settlement by freedmen. Each head of family could be granted forty acres of land, to which he would be given a "possessory title" until Congress "shall regulate their title."
²⁶
This land had of course belonged to slaveholders. Their dispossession of it by Sherman's order, like Lincoln's dispossession of their slaves by

24
. In June 1864, Lincoln had finally accepted Chase's third offer to resign from the cabinet. In October, Taney died, and two months later the president appointed Chase chief justice in part as a gesture of conciliation to the radical wing of his party.

25
.
Liberator
, Feb. 24, 1865.

26
.
O.R.
, Ser. IV, Vol. 47, pt. 2, pp. 60–62.

the Emancipation Proclamation, was a military measure carried out under "war powers." The 13th Amendment confirmed Lincoln's action; it remained to be seen how Court, Congress, and Executive would deal with the consequences of Sherman's Order No. 15. The army did not wait, however. During the next several months General Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist who commanded the Union occupation forces on the South Carolina sea islands, supervised the settlement of 40,000 freed-men on land designated in Sherman's order.

The wartime experience of Union army officers who governed occupied territory, of Treasury agents who had charge of abandoned plantations, and of freedmen's aid societies that sent missionaries and teachers to the freed slaves made clear the need for a government agency to coordinate their efforts. All too often these various groups pulled in different directions—and the freedmen themselves in still another direction. In 1863 Congress first considered legislation to create a Freedmen's Bureau. Disagreement whether this agency should be part of the War or the Treasury Department prevented final enactment of a bill until March 3, 1865. By then Chase was no longer secretary of the treasury, so radical Republicans who had wanted him in charge of the Bureau were now willing to place it in the War Department. The function of the Bureau (formally called the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) would be to dispense rations and relief to the hundreds of thousands of white as well as black refugees uprooted by the war and to assist the freedmen during the difficult transition from slavery to freedom. Congress also gave the Bureau control of "abandoned" land with the provision that individual freedmen "shall be assigned not more than forty acres" of such land at rental for three years and an option to buy at the end of that time with "such title thereto as the United States can convey."
²⁷
Here was Sherman's Order No. 15 writ large. Whether Congress would be able to convey any title was a troublesome question, given the constitutional ban on bills of attainder and the presidential power of pardon and restoration of property. In any event, the Freedmen's Bureau represented an unprecedented extension of the federal government into matters of social welfare and labor relations—to meet unprecedented problems produced by the emancipation of four million slaves and the building of a new society on the ashes of the old.

The success or failure of the Freedmen's Bureau would be partly determined

27
.
U. S. Statutes at Large
, XIII, 507–9.

by the political terms of reconstruction. This matter occupied much of Congress's time during the winter of 1864–65. Prospects seemed good for a compromise with the president. The afterglow of a Republican electoral sweep had dissolved the bitterness that had crested with Lincoln's pocket veto of the Wade-Davis bill. Chase's elevation to the Court was another step toward rapprochement between Lincoln and radical Republicans. The president's reference to reconstruction in his message to Congress on December 6 hinted at the likelihood of "more rigorous measures than heretofore."
²⁸
This willingness to meet Congress halfway set the stage for an attempt to enact a new reconstruction bill. The outlines of such legislation soon emerged in negotiations between Lincoln and congressional leaders: Congress would accept the already reconstructed regimes of Louisiana and Arkansas (soon to be joined by Tennessee) in return for a presidential promise to sign legislation similar to the Wade-Davis bill for the other Confederate states.

As first introduced in the House this new bill enfranchised "all male citizens"—including blacks. Lincoln persuaded the committee chairman in charge of the bill to modify it to limit this provision to black soldiers. During the next two months the measure went through a bewildering series of revisions and amendments in committee and on the House floor. At one stage it enfranchised literate blacks as well as soldiers; at another it removed racial qualifications altogether; at still another it applied these provisions to Louisiana and Arkansas as well as to the other states. Democrats voted with moderate Republicans to defeat the more radical versions of the bill and joined radicals to defeat the more conservative versions. Consequently no bill could be passed. Not wishing to create a precedent for Executive reconstruction by seating Louisiana's senators and representatives in Congress, radicals teamed with Democrats to deny them admission. Thus the 38th Congress expired without any further action on reconstruction. Radical Republicans thought this just as well. The next Congress would have more radicals and fewer Democrats, noted one of them, and "in the meantime I hope the nation may be educated up to our demand for universal suffrage."
²⁹

The prospect of "educating" Lincoln up to this demand seemed

28
.
CWL
, VIII, 152.

29
. Congressman James M. Ashley in
Boston Commonwealth
, March 4, 1865. For a skillful analysis of these confusing debates and votes on reconstruction see Herman Belz,
Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War
(Ithaca, 1969), 244–76.

promising. He had moved steadily leftward during the war, from no emancipation to limited emancipation with colonization and then to universal emancipation with limited suffrage. This trajectory might well carry him to a broader platform of equal suffrage by the time the war ended. The entreaty in Lincoln's second inaugural address for "malice toward none" and "charity for all" provided few clues on this question, though it seemed to endorse generous treatment of ex-rebels. At the same time this address left no doubt of Lincoln's intention to fight on until slavery was crushed forever. "Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away," said the nation's sixteenth president at the beginning of his second term. "Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled up by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.' "
³⁰

III

Ulysses S. Grant was determined that it should not take that long. During the winter, Union forces at Petersburg had fought their way westward to cut off the last road into town from the south and threaten the last open railroad. With Lee's army of 55,000 melting away by desertions while the oncoming spring dried roads after an exceptionally raw, wet winter, the final success of Grant's 120,000 seemed only a matter of time. Sherman could be expected on Lee's rear by late April, but Grant wanted the Army of the Potomac to "vanquish their old enemy" without help that might produce future gloating by Sherman's veterans. "I mean to end the business here," the general in chief told Phil Sheridan. Grant's main concern now was that he might wake one morning to find Lee gone to join Johnston's 20,000 for an attack on Sherman.
³¹
Lee had precisely that in mind. In his effort to accomplish it, however, he gave Grant a long-sought opportunity to drive the ragged rebels from their trenches into the open.