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

the Capitol steps on a blustery March 4 to take his second oath of office as president. In the brief address he gave before taking the oath, Lincoln reviewed the fundamental causes of the war—slavery, … the demand for slavery’s extension westward into the territories, and … the idea that the Constitution permitted secession from the Union when those demands were not met. But he also took the opportunity of this review to set these immediate causes of war in the context of a larger metaphysical, almost theological question. Lincoln looked beyond the material causes of the war and urged Northerners and Southerners alike to think of it (as John Brown had prophesied before his execution in 1859) as a judgment by God on a crime that the whole nation, not just one section, had been guilty of.

Perhaps, Lincoln speculated, the war ultimately was not about secession or slavery but about the mysteries of divine providence and moral judgment. In this life, the Bible told him that offenses are unavoidable, and slavery had certainly been an offense. Slavery had grown up from the first in America without anyone’s particular bidding, and in spite of the best intentions of the Founders. But like sinners in the hands of an angry God, not even those who had merely inherited such offenses have the right to plead inability and innocence. “If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came,” Lincoln asked, “shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to him?”15

But if the time had now come, at whatever the cost, to rip up slavery by the roots, then human beings could only bow their heads to that cost as the price of a national life in which “offences must needs come.” Perhaps it would be only justice, Lincoln said, that “all the wealth piled up by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” and “every drop of blood drawn with the lash” shall now “be paid by another drawn with the sword.” These words were bound to surprise and enrage those who thought of themselves as the righteous, who had suffered innocently from the depravity of the “slave power.” But they could protest all they liked; their argument would not be with Lincoln. “As it was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’” Americans must not waste their energies now in judgment—that belonged to the inscrutable God who moved all things in such mysterious ways—but in the one exercise that still was within their grasp, that of mercy.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Eloquent as these words were as religious philosophy, they were also read as a promise of a speedy and painless Reconstruction. Certainly speed was part of Lincoln’s Reconstruction agenda. After four years of war, Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment by the slimmest of margins, and efforts by the Radicals to promote a Reconstruction bill in Congress guaranteeing the freed slaves the right to vote had died on the floor. Allowing Reconstruction to proceed under the single eye of the executive branch might get better, faster, less ambiguous results than with all the cooks in Congress stirring the pot. A month after the inaugural, Lincoln once again called on Louisianans (whose state was furthest along the road to Reconstruction) to open “the elective franchise” to the “very intelligent” among African Americans and “those who serve our cause as soldiers.” His appointment of Salmon Chase as Taney’s successor on the Supreme Court was also a direct way of dealing with the threat of postwar legal appeals from the war’s military results. “Judge Chase would only be sustaining himself … as regarded the emancipation policy of the government,” Lincoln remarked to a newspaper correspondent, and added to George Boutwell, “We want a man who will sustain the Legal Tender Act and the Proclamation of Emancipation.”16

Keeping the cards securely in his own hands was uppermost in his mind when at the end of March 1865 Lincoln came down to the James River to confer with Grant and with Sherman, who had come up from the Carolina coast by steamer for the meeting. There, Lincoln talked to his premier generals about the kind of terms he wanted given to the South and its armies if and when they surrendered. He advised them to offer whatever they thought would induce surrender of the Confederate armies as a whole, since it would be better to let them give up their arms as organized groups rather than pressing the Confederates so hard that they broke up into innumerable guerilla bands. He expressed the hope that Jefferson Davis could be allowed to escape the country, rather than running the risk of a sensational treason trial, and Sherman remembered Lincoln suggesting that the generals might even offer to recognize the existing rebel state governments, especially in North Carolina, as an inducement to surrender “till Congress could provide others.” And since Congress had now adjourned (and with the new Congress elected in November not scheduled to assemble until December 1865), Lincoln had a free hand to end the war, resuscitate the Southern state governments, and move them toward black civil rights without Congress