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

TREASON MUST BE MADE INFAMOUS

Supreme Court chief justice Salmon P. Chase remembered the night of Lincoln’s assassination as “a night of horrors.” Or so it seemed to Chase, not only because of the shame and brutality of Lincoln’s murder and the possibility that Chase “was one of the destined victims,” but also because of what Lincoln’s death meant for a peace process that had only just begun. Chase arose early the next morning— “a heavy rain was falling, and the sky was black”—and met with Attorney General James Speed to discuss the procedures earlier chief justices had used for swearing in vice presidents as the new president. But the conversation lingered over “the late president,” and Speed mournfully shook his head over the impact Lincoln’s murder would have on the plans for Reconstruction. “He never seemed so near our views,” Speed remarked. “At the [cabinet] meeting he said he thought [he] had made a mistake at Richmond in sanctioning the assembling of the Virginia Legislature and had perhaps been too fast in his desires for early reconstruction.”41

Lincoln’s uncertainty about the speed of the Reconstruction process as the war came to an end is not surprising. It was still not clear what freedom actually meant for the newly free slaves, or even (until the Thirteenth Amendment was formally ratified in December) whether freedom was a fact for all the slaves. As the Federal armies rolled over large parts of the South, Southern white Unionists sprang up to seize political control of Southern state capitals, but their attentions were mostly preoccupied with evening up political scores with the secessionists who had plunged them into the war rather than with the civil rights of the newly freed slaves. Even in Louisiana, where Lincoln had taken more than a presidential interest in the structure of a new Louisiana government, all the personal pressure in the world had been unable to persuade the new white Unionist government to make any provision for black civil rights.

But already three major questions were beginning to emerge from the thinning battle smoke of the war, and in Lincoln’s absence, these would not become the ruling problems of the next dozen years. The first of these questions was a holdover from Lincoln’s wartime disagreements with the Radicals: what was the constitutional status of the Confederate states? If Lincoln was right in maintaining that secession was a nullity, then were the Confederate states to be restored at once to their status quo of 1860? Or if, as the Radicals insisted, they were “conquered provinces” that had lost their statehood privileges, were they to be reorganized by Congress or by the president and the military? The second question concerned the freed slaves: what was their legal status? True, they were no longer slaves; but did that automatically promote them to the place of citizens, with all the civil rights of citizens? And what was a citizen, exactly? The implication of the Constitution, based on the requirement that the president be a “natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States,” was that citizenship was a matter of jus soli, of being born on the national land or soil. But Dred Scott inserted a different requirement for citizenship, that of jus sanguinis— citizenship by specific birthright—which the court then used to deny Scott, as a man of “African descent,” any civil standing in the federal courts. 42 Did this mean that emancipated slaves were to be left in legal limbo, while white Confederates returned to all the privileges of citizenship they had repudiated?

That introduced the third and most practical question of Reconstruction: who would now be in power, not only in the old Confederacy, but in Washington itself? The end of slavery meant, practically, an end to the three-fifths clause—there would be no more slaves to count in that fashion. But this only created another nightmare: if the Southern states could now return to Congress, they would be able to demand that their delegations be increased by counting their black populations in full, rather than by the three-fifths rule—yet without actually giving those blacks the right to vote for the increased number of representatives the South would be entitled to. With those added numbers, the result would be the rollback of every initiative the Republicans had achieved in their brief dominance of the wartime Congress—protective tariffs, government assistance to the railroads, the Homestead Act, the national banking system—as well as assumption of the Confederate war debt.

The way for Republicans in Congress to head off this unintended consequence of emancipation would be to seize control of the Reconstruction process as a congressional prerogative so as to prevent a too-hasty return of the Confederate states to the Union, to correct the Constitution’s fatal ambiguity over citizenship in order to qualify the freedpeople for it, and to ensure that, as citizens, the freedpeople would be able to exercise all the rights—to vote, to hold public office, to access the court system, to own property—that went with citizenship. The freedman would then (promised Frederick Douglass) “raise up a party in the Southern States among the poor,” and establish a long-term Republican political hegemony in the formerly Democratic South.43

With political power in hand, the freedpeople would also become the foot soldiers of a re-creation of the defeated South in the image of free-labor liberalism. “In my view, the war has just begun,” announced the veteran abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips. Merely subtracting slavery from the Southern social equation was not enough. “You do not annihilate a social system when you decree its death,” Phillips explained. “You only annihilate it when you fill its place with another”—another, in this case, meaning a regime based on free labor, universal education, and manufacturing. “The whole fabric of southern society must be changed,” urged Thaddeus Stevens, “and never can be done if this opportunity is lost. How can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse