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

lengthen Reconstruction almost indefinitely, since it was difficult to see how half of the present population of any Confederate state could be persuaded to take a loyalty oath to the United States before a long time had passed. Lincoln, who understood perfectly what a shambles the Wade-Davis bill would make of Reconstruction, simply killed it by means of a pocket veto. He was not unsympathetic to the Radicals’ determination that reconstructed governments be genuinely loyal to the Constitution, but he was also convinced that they had forgotten that his administration did not have all the time in the world. Emancipation—the goal both he and the Radicals shared—was as yet only a military action, and dignified only by what he could claim as his war powers. While the war was still on and Union occupation forces clearly held the whip handle, emancipation could be forced down Southern throats relatively easily. But let the war end suddenly, or let his administration lose the upcoming election in November to a Democratic peace candidate, and the military justification for emancipation would evaporate at the same moment that the shooting stopped. The military threat behind emancipation would cease to exist, and civil court challenges to the permanent legality of emancipation would immediately flood into the federal courts.

Better to take an imperfect Reconstruction that got emancipation onto the books now than delay Reconstruction so long that a changed political or military climate might make emancipation impossible. Lincoln, in a document issued after Congress adjourned, insisted that he was not “inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration,” and that he was not going to undo the “free State constitutions and government already adopted” in places such as Louisiana. This did not do much to convince either Davis or Wade. On August 5 the two Radicals published a defiant manifesto reminding Lincoln, in terms that Lincoln himself ironically had to acknowledge, that “if he wishes our support, he must confine himself to his Executive duties—to obey and execute, not to make the laws—to suppress by arms armed rebellion, and leave political re-organization to Congress.”84

The people whose support Lincoln most dreaded losing, and seemed closest to losing by 1864, were the 21 million citizens of the North and border states. To Lincoln, it seemed that they, too, had lost faith in him. Emancipation, even delayed as long as it had been by Lincoln, was still far in advance of the racial consciousness of most Americans, and the Democratic press in particular dwelt heavily upon the economic penalties white workers would have to pay if emancipation unleashed a flood of free blacks who came north and competed for jobs. Worse than emancipation, however, was the backlash stimulated by Congress’s decision to institute military conscription in 1862 and then adopt a federal conscription law in March 1863.

No one in Washington in 1861 had really planned to resort to mass conscription to fill the armies, simply because no one had thought it would be necessary. The flood tide of volunteers who enlisted in 1861 seemed to provide all the manpower anyone could possibly want for the war. But the enlistments of the forty regiments that Congress had authorized for two years back in 1861 ran out in mid-1863, and as they did, few of the two-year veterans showed much enthusiasm for reenlistment. At the same time, the tide of volunteers who had enlisted in three-year regiments in 1861 and 1862 had noticeably flattened by 1863. In July 1862, Radical Republican senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts drew up a new Militia Act to replace the outdated 1795 Federal militia ordinance, and in addition to setting aside the racial color line and permitting black enlistment, the new act mandated the enrollment by each state of all male citizens between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, and authorized the president to set quotas for each state to meet in the event that a draft would be necessary.85

In order to avoid resorting to an outright draft of unwilling men, the states tried to stimulate volunteering by offering bounties to recruits. “Most of us were surprised,” wrote one Pennsylvania volunteer in 1862, “when, a few days after our arrival in [Camp Curtin], we were told that the County Commissioners had come down for the purpose of paying us each the magnificent sum of fifty dollars. At the same time, also, we learned that the United States Government would pay us each one hundred dollars additional. …” 86 By 1863, these bounties were no longer a surprise. Considering that the average workingman’s annual wages ranged between $300 and $500 in the 1860s, these bounties were considerable sums of money, and reluctant volunteers could frequently be enticed into service by the prospect of a bounty that could buy enough land for a farm or a homestead.87

The prime difficulty with the bounty system—apart from the appearance it gave of bribing Northern males to do what should have been their civic duty—was how liable it was to abuses of various sorts. Communities and states eager to fill up state volunteer quotas found themselves competing with other communities and states for volunteers. Presently the politicians began a bidding war for recruits and offered multiple bounties that could total more than $1,000 when added up. That, in turn, invited the appearance of “bounty jumpers,” who enlisted in one state or community to receive a bounty, then deserted and reenlisted under another name in another state to pick up another bounty. One bounty jumper, John O’Connor, who was caught in Albany, New York, in March 1865, confessed to having bounty-jumped thirty-two times before being caught.88

If the bounties were the carrot for enlistment, then the draft was clearly the stick. It did not take long for a draft to become necessary: little more than two weeks after the passage of the new Militia Act, Lincoln authorized Stanton to initiate a draft that would yield 300,000 men. On August 9, Stanton issued orders describing how the governors of the states were to implement the enrolling