The Fiery Trial (46 page)

Lincoln’s public letters proved enormously popular. “No document issued since your inauguration,” wrote a Republican from Philadelphia of the Corning letter, “has done more to satisfy the public mind.” “All the loyal papers” printed the letter and the Loyal Publication Society circulated over half a million copies. A Republican newspaper praised the “penetrating common sense” of the Conkling letter, predicting that its “plain and honest language” would resonate more deeply among northerners than the “rhetorical artifices” of other politicians. The wide circulation of Lincoln’s letters contributed to the stunning reversal of the results of 1862 in the state elections of 1863. These, in effect, amounted to a referendum on the vast changes the country had experienced in the past year. Republicans carried every major statewide race and increased their majority in Congress. In the closely watched governor’s election in Ohio, Vallandigham received only 40 percent of the vote, well below the Democrats’ usual total.
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Two weeks after the Republican triumph, Lincoln traveled by train to Gettysburg to dedicate a military cemetery at the site of the battle in which 8,000 men had lost their lives. This was one of the very few times during his presidency that Lincoln left Washington to deliver a speech. On the day of his address, November 19, 1863, Lincoln had to wait while the featured speaker, the orator Edward Everett, delivered a florid two-hour speech presenting a detailed history of the battle interspersed with references to classical antiquity and political philosophy. Then followed a period in which the crowd of 15,000 stretched their limbs, moved about, and relaxed, followed by an ode performed by the Maryland Musical Association. Finally, his friend Ward Hill Lamon, marshal of the District of Columbia, introduced the president. Lincoln’s remarks took a little over two minutes. His theme was the war’s transcendent significance:

Some observers immediately recognized the genius of the Gettysburg Address. It was “a perfect gem,” declared the
Springfield Republican
, “deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression,” a model of “verbal perfection and beauty” that would “well repay” multiple readings. The day after the dedication, Edward Everett wrote to Lincoln, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.” Many Democrats, however, denounced Lincoln for unilaterally redefining the war’s purpose, which, they insisted, had nothing to do with equality. The founders, wrote the
Chicago Times
, rejected the idea “that negroes were their equals…. How dare, he, then, standing on the [soldiers’] graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government?”
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As early as his Lyceum speech of 1838, Lincoln had identified the United States as “a political edifice of liberty and equal rights” and the idea of democratic self-government as the core principle of the American polity. In other ways, however, his language and argument at Gettysburg were new. The cadences and language—hallow, consecrate, a new birth—were more overtly biblical than in past speeches. He had never before used the opening language, which recalled a passage from one of the Psalms but perhaps was suggested by Speaker Galusha Grow’s remarks at the convening of the special session of Congress in July 1861. (Grow, like Lincoln, identified July 4, 1776, as the date of the nation’s creation, but his math was faulty—his “fourscore years ago” counted back to 1781.) The Gettysburg Address also contained a subtle but significant shift in wording. Since the mid-1840s, in referring to the United States Lincoln had generally used the word “Union,” a polity composed of individual states, rather than “nation,” a unitary entity. In his message to Congress of July 1861, Lincoln had referred to the Union over forty times and the nation only three. Now, he spoke of the nation five times and did not mention the Union at all. In this, the speech reflected the explosive growth of national self-consciousness that arose from the Civil War.
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Lincoln did not explicitly mention either slavery or emancipation at Gettysburg. But no one could mistake the meaning of the “new birth of freedom” to which he alluded. The Gettysburg Address offered a powerful definition of the reborn nation that was to emerge from the Civil War as a land of both liberty and equality. Left unanswered was the question of how fully blacks would share in that promise in a nation where they had never known it, and whether they would finally be recognized as part of “the people” on whom, Lincoln’s concluding words declared, the government rested. But so long as emancipation remained incomplete, securing abolition, not defining equality, remained Lincoln’s immediate concern. Three weeks after he spoke at Gettysburg, Lincoln returned to this question when he outlined for the first time a plan for what was already being called Reconstruction: how to govern southern areas that came under federal control and under what conditions to restore them to the Union.

Lincoln had insisted from the war’s outset that legally the Confederate states remained in the Union, which, among other things, meant that they retained authority over slavery within their borders. In the first part of 1862, Radicals in Congress had advanced an alternative approach. Charles Sumner presented resolutions to the Senate stating that the seceding states had committed suicide as political entities and reverted to territorial status. This meant that Congress could govern them directly, and implied the termination of those “local institutions” that depended for their existence on state law, chief among them slavery. In the House, James Ashley, the Radical from Ohio, introduced a bill to establish territorial governments in the occupied South. Democrats, border-state members of Congress, and moderate Republicans vehemently opposed these measures, considering them “virtually an ordinance of secession,” since they seemed to accept the idea that Confederate states were no longer fully parts of the Union. With no agreement in sight, the House in March 1862 tabled Ashley’s proposal.
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The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the problem of Reconstruction, for it implied that the Confederate states could not resume their prewar status without acknowledging the destruction of slavery. During 1863, Lincoln repeatedly urged military governors in the South to organize loyal governments that abolished slavery, even in states all or part of which he had exempted from the proclamation. “Get emancipation into your new state government—Constitution,” he urged Andrew Johnson, Tennessee’s military governor, in September. Two months later, he insisted that any new government established in Louisiana must be committed to the end of slavery. People had to take sides, he wrote, “be
for
and not
against
…permanent freedom.”
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At the same time, however, Lincoln repeatedly suggested in 1863 that he would prefer a gradual end to slavery and a probationary period of black apprenticeship, as he had proposed in his 1849 bill for abolition in the District of Columbia. He had long feared that immediate emancipation would produce chaos. A week after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he wrote to Major General John A. McClernand, who commanded part of Grant’s army engaged in the attack on Vicksburg, that southern states were welcome to “adopt systems of apprenticeship for the colored people, conforming substantially to the most approved plans of gradual emancipation.” In July 1863, he suggested to General Stephen A. Hurlbut that “some plan, substantially being gradual emancipation, would be better for both white and black,” and urged him to press Arkansas Unionists to move in this direction. In November, on the day he departed for Gettysburg, Lincoln told a Texas Unionist that the sudden destruction of slavery would “be attended with great ruin.” He would be “glad to see” the state adopt a plan of “gradual emancipation.”
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How gradual abolition would work remained quite unclear. Would those who had been declared free on January 1, 1863, revert for a time to slavery or apprenticeship? Gradual emancipation had been carried out by northern states in the early republic. But its recent history, especially in the British Caribbean, was hardly encouraging. In Illinois, as Lincoln must have known, apprenticeship had served as a means of continuing slavery, not a pathway to freedom. Rather than carefully thought-out proposals, Lincoln’s references to gradualism and apprenticeship were efforts to make emancipation and reunion palatable to white southerners even as he insisted that Confederate states could not return to the Union without taking steps to ensure the future end of slavery. Secretary of the Treasury Chase thought the effort misguided. “The Southern people whom we must conciliate,” he wrote in April 1863, “are the black Americans” and those whites willing to adjust immediately to a free-labor system. “All others,” he believed, “are naturally in sympathy with the rebellion.” Orestes Brownson pointed out that to allow slaveholders to retain control of black labor for a time appeared inconsistent with the logic of the Emancipation Proclamation. If the justification for ending slavery was military necessity, he observed, then abolition “must be immediate.”
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Despite Lincoln’s talk of gradualism and other actions to encourage southern Unionism, his efforts to create loyal governments in the South in 1863 failed to produce results. Andrew Johnson did not create a functioning civilian government in Tennessee, and nothing was accomplished by military governors in North Carolina, Arkansas, or Louisiana. A new approach seemed imperative. Moreover, in the wake of Union victories in the summer of 1863, the question of Reconstruction suddenly moved to the forefront of political debate, exacerbating factionalism within the Republican party. “The whole political community,” noted the
New York Times
, “seems to be plunging headlong into this discussion.” The
Times
urged Lincoln not to make the abolition of slavery a requirement for reunion. In October, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair delivered an intemperate speech at Rockville, Maryland, denouncing an article in the
Atlantic Monthly
by Charles Sumner that outlined the doctrine of state suicide and called for equal rights for the emancipated slaves. Blair condemned Radicals who, he claimed, wished to “amalgamate” blacks and whites and enfranchise the freedmen, subjecting whites to their rule. He insisted that the seceded states had lost none of their traditional rights, including the authority to regulate the suffrage, and equated Confederates and abolitionists as “equally despotic” extremists bent on overthrowing the Constitution.
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One of a series of addresses in 1863 in which Blair, claiming (without authority) to speak for the president, sought to counter “revolutionary attempts…to abolish the state governments for the interest of Negrodom,” the Rockville speech led to an angry counterattack from Radical Republicans. In November, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan urged Lincoln to “
stand firm
” against conservative pressure, pointing out that Republicans had succeeded in the recent elections by taking “bold
radical
” positions in favor of emancipation and against “slaveholders.” As always, Lincoln sought to maintain party unity. On reading the Rockville speech, he remarked that the controversy between Blair and Sumner “is one of mere form and little else.” To Chandler, Lincoln responded, “I hope to ‘stand firm’ enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country’s cause.”
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On December 2, 1863, to the roar of 100 cannons, Thomas Crawford’s colossal
Statue of Freedom
was hoisted to the top of the Capitol dome. Eight years earlier, Jefferson Davis, then the secretary of war, had ordered the statue’s original design changed, for the female figure wore a cap of liberty, a symbol in ancient Rome of emancipated slaves. Crawford replaced the cap with a feathered helmet. He could hardly have imagined that by the time the statue was completed, the liberty of hundreds of thousands of slaves would be real, not simply allegoric. Six days after the statue was put in place, Lincoln sent his annual message to the opening session of the Thirty-eighth Congress, along with the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction intended to secure the reuniting of the nation. Senator William E. Chandler of New Hampshire had written in November that Republicans desired “a policy radical enough
to destroy slavery
, conservative enough
to save the nation
.” This is what Lincoln sought to provide.
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