Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

useful for prodding reluctant generals into action. By the same token, the committee members groused to themselves about Lincoln and occasionally used their hearings to air ill-disguised hints about the direction of war policy, but they never actually challenged Lincoln the way they would challenge and then impeach his successor in future years. The committee, and the Radicals for whom it spoke, recognized in Lincoln an ideological equal but not a practical political one, and their constant agitation for more drastic prosecution of the war amounted to an ongoing criticism not of Lincoln’s principles but of what they saw as Lincoln’s imperfect application of them.79

It was not the war but the shape of the Reconstruction that must follow it that became the most serious issue between Lincoln and the Radical Republicans. Acting on his premise that secession was a legal impossibility, Lincoln urged Congress to accept new governments for the Southern states as soon as a Unionist majority among the citizens could make Reconstruction there ready. In March 1862 he appointed Andrew Johnson, a Unionist Democrat and the only Southern senator who had steadfastly refused to resign from the U.S. Senate after his state seceded, as “Military Governor of the State of Tennessee… until the loyal inhabitants of that state shall organize a civil government in conformity with the Constitution of the United States.” Over the next four months, Lincoln appointed Edward Stanly, an old North Carolina Whig, as military governor of the occupied eastern shore of North Carolina, and John Smith Phelps as military governor for Arkansas, both with a similar mandate to restore their states to the Union. In occupied Louisiana, a provisional military government actually managed to have two elected representatives (from the two occupied congressional districts), Benjamin Flanders and Michael Hahn, seated in the House. 80

Then, on December 8, 1863, Lincoln published “A Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” which offered occupied Louisiana a Reconstruction scheme detailing a process for the formation of a new state government. Any inhabitant of Louisiana could obtain a pardon for participating in the rebellion by taking a loyalty oath to the U.S. Constitution and “all acts of Congress passed during the existing rebellion with reference to slaves” and “all proclamations of the President made during the existing rebellion having reference to slaves, so long and so far as not modified or declared void by decision of the Supreme Court.” In other words, with one eye kept firmly on the chance that his actions might be challenged in the federal courts, Lincoln was offering to trade presidential pardons for submission to the Emancipation Proclamation before the Taney Court got a chance to void the Proclamation. The only exclusions Lincoln kept in place would be for high-ranking Confederate military officers, politicians who had resigned federal offices (and who had therefore violated their oath to support the Constitution), and anyone guilty of abusing Federal prisoners, “colored persons or white persons.” Then, when 10 percent of the 1860 voting population had taken the loyalty oath, occupied Louisiana could reestablish its state government, and any provisions in reestablished state governments that would make black freedom permanent and provide for the education of freed slaves “will not be objected to by the national Executive.”81

Lincoln, not knowing how the war might turn out, hoped to use this proclamation as a means of wedging emancipation into the constitutions of as many occupied states as soon as possible. The Radicals, however, criticized this plan as too flimsy and too unrealistic a foundation for genuine Reconstruction, in Louisiana or anywhere else. A number of the Radicals, headed by Wade and Sumner, argued that the seceding states had committed “state suicide” and should now be treated as conquered provinces and made to pass again through the entire process of territorialization before being readmitted to the Union. And when Louisianans attempted to follow Lincoln’s directives and re-create a Louisiana constitution, they unwittingly lent the Radicals a stick to beat them with by endorsing only emancipation and not black voting rights, even for black Louisiana soldiers. Lincoln delicately pointed out this oversight to Michael Hahn, the new Louisiana governor, and pressed Hahn privately to have black voting rights included in the new state constitution. The damage had been done, however, and when representatives from the newly reconstructed Louisiana government showed up in Congress in 1864, the Radicals, led by Sumner, prevented them from being officially recognized.82

Then in July 1864, the Radicals moved to take the initiative on Reconstruction out of Lincoln’s hands altogether. Henry Winter Davis in the House and Ben Wade in the Senate sponsored a bill that, although it stopped short of “territorializing” the seceder states, still upped the ante of Reconstruction far above Lincoln’s levels. Instead of the 10 percent of the 1860 voting population specified in the Lincoln proclamation as the requisite for Reconstruction, the Wade-Davis bill demanded the “enrollment” of all the white male citizens of states where “military resistance… shall have been suppressed” and the extraction of a loyalty oath from “a majority of the persons enrolled in the State.” Once the loyalty of a white majority had been established (and this time no inclusion of black citizens would be permitted, since that would make the readmission process too quick and painless), the “loyal people” of a state could elect a convention and reestablish their state government. However, no one who had served in the Confederate army or held political office under the Confederacy was eligible to vote for a delegate to this convention or be elected as a delegate. Likewise, no matter what the form of state government eventually drawn up by the convention, no one who had ever served in the Confederate military or civil service could vote for, or be elected to, any office. Moreover, all public debts under the Confederate regime were to be repudiated (which meant that those holding Confederate bonds, notes, or currency lost everything they had invested), and “involuntary servitude” was to be “forever prohibited.”83

What this did, in effect, was to