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

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.”11

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.12

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?”13

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.14

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