Abraham Lincoln, Volume II

by Jr. John T. Morse

People differed much in feeling as well as opinion upon this difficult subject, this problem which was solved by no law. Treason is a crime and must be made odious, said Andrew Johnson, sternly uttering the sentiments of many earnest and strenuous men in Congress and in the country. Others were able to eliminate revengefulness, but felt that it was not safe in the present, nor wise for the future, to restore to rebels all the rights of citizenship upon the moment when they should consent to abandon rebellion, more especially when all knew and admitted that the abandonment was made not in penitence but merely in despair of success. It was open to extremists to argue that the whole seceded area might logically, as conquered lands, be reduced to a territorial condition, to be recarved into States at such times and upon such conditions as should seem proper. But others, in agreement with the President, insisted that if no State could lawfully secede, it followed that no State could lawfully be deprived of statehood. These persons reinforced their legal argument with the sentimental one that lenity was the best policy. As General Grant afterward put it: "The people who had been in rebellion must necessarily come back into the Union, and be incorporated as an integral part of the nation. Naturally

the nearer they were placed to an equality with the people who had not rebelled, the more reconciled they would feel with their old antagonists, and the better citizens they would be from the beginning. They surely would not make good citizens if they felt that they had a yoke around their necks." The question, in what proportions mercy and justice should be, or safely could be, mingled, was clearly one of discretion. In the wide distance betwixt the holders of extreme opinions an infinite variety of schemes and theories was in time broached and held. Very soon the gravity of the problem was greatly enhanced by its becoming complicated with proposals for giving the suffrage to negroes. Upon this Mr. Lincoln expressed his opinion that the privilege might be wisely conferred upon "the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks," though apparently he intended thus to describe no very large percentage. Apparently his confidence in the civic capacity of the negro never became very much greater than it had been in the days of the joint debates with Douglas.

Congress took up the matter very promptly, and with much display of feeling. Early in May, 1864, Henry Winter Davis, a vehement opponent of the President, introduced a bill, of which the anti-rebel preamble was truculent to the point of being amusing. His first fierce Whereas declared that the Confederate States were waging a war so glaringly unjust "that they have no right to claim

the mitigation of the extreme rights of war, which are accorded by modern usage to an enemy who has a right to consider the war a just one." But Congress, though hotly irritated, was not quite willing to say, in terms, that it would eschew civilization and adopt barbarism, as its system for the conduct of the war; and accordingly it rejected Mr. Davis's fierce exordium. The words had very probably only been used by him as a sort of safety valve to give vent to the fury of his wrath, so that he could afterward approach the serious work of the bill in a milder spirit; for in fact the actual effective legislation which he proposed was by no means unreasonable. After military resistance should be suppressed in any rebellious State, the white male citizens were to elect a convention for the purpose of reëstablishing a state government. The new organization must disfranchise prominent civil and military officers of the Confederacy, establish the permanent abolition of slavery, and prohibit the payment by the new State of any indebtedness incurred for Confederate purposes. After Congress should have expressed its assent to the work of the convention, the President was to recognize by proclamation the reorganized State. This bill, of course, gave to the legislative department the whole valuable control in the matter of recognition, leaving to the President nothing more than the mere empty function of issuing a proclamation, which he would have no right to hold back; but in other respects its requirements were

entirely fair and unobjectionable, from any point of view, and it finally passed the House by a vote of 74 to 59. The Senate amended it, but afterward receded from the amendment, and thus the measure came before Mr. Lincoln on July 4, 1864. Congress was to adjourn at noon on that day, and he was at the Capitol, signing bills, when this one was brought to him. He laid it aside. Zachariah Chandler, senator from Michigan, a dictatorial gentleman and somewhat of the busybody order, was watchfully standing by, and upon observing this action, he asked Mr. Lincoln, with some show of feeling, whether he was not going to sign that bill. Mr. Lincoln replied that it was a "matter of too much importance to be swallowed in that way." Mr. Chandler warned him that a veto would be very damaging at the Northwest, and said: "The important point is that one prohibiting slavery in the reconstructed States." "This is the point," said Mr. Lincoln, "on which I doubt the authority of Congress to act." "It is no more than you have done yourself," said the senator. "I conceive," replied Mr. Lincoln, "that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress." A few moments later he remarked to the members of the cabinet: "I do not see how any of us now can deny and contradict what we have always said: that Congress has no constitutional power over slavery in the States.... This bill and the position of these gentlemen seem to me, in asserting

that the insurrectionary States are no longer in the Union, to make the fatal admission that States, whenever they please, may of their own motion dissolve their connection with the Union. Now we cannot survive that admission, I am convinced. If that be true, I am not President; these gentlemen are not Congress. I have laboriously endeavored to avoid that question ever since it first began to be mooted.... It was to obviate this question that I earnestly favored the movement for an amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery.... I thought it much better, if it were possible, to restore the Union without the necessity for a violent quarrel among its friends as to whether certain States have been in or out of the Union during the war,—a merely metaphysical question, and one unnecessary to be forced into discussion."[^[58]] So the bill remained untouched at his side.

A few days after the adjournment, having then decided not to sign the bill, he issued a proclamation in which he said concerning it, that he was "unprepared by a formal approval of [it] to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration;" that he was also "unprepared to declare that the free-state constitutions and governments, already adopted and installed in Arkansas and Louisiana, [should] be set aside and held for naught, thereby repelling and discouraging the

loyal citizens, who have set up the same, as to further effort;" also that he was unprepared to "declare a constitutional competency in Congress to abolish slavery in the States." Yet he also said that he was fully satisfied that the system proposed in the bill was "one very proper plan" for the loyal people of any State to adopt, and that he should be ready to aid in such adoption upon any opportunity. In a word, his objection to the bill lay chiefly in the fact that it established one single and exclusive process for reconstruction. The rigid exclusiveness seemed to him a serious error. Upon his part, in putting forth his own plan, he had taken much pains distinctly to keep out this characteristic, and to have it clearly understood that his proposition was not designed as "a procrustean bed, to which exact conformity was to be indispensable;" it was not the only method, but only a method.

So soon as it was known that the President would not sign the bill, a vehement cry of wrath broke from all its more ardent friends. H.W. Davis and B.F. Wade, combative men, and leaders in their party, who expected their opinion to be respected, published in the New York "Tribune" an address "To the Supporters of the Government." In unbridled language they charged "encroachments of the executive on the authority of Congress." They even impugned the honesty of the President's purpose in words of direct personal insult; for they said: "The President, by preventing

this bill from becoming a law, holds the electoral votes of the rebel States at the dictation of his personal ambition.... If electors for president be allowed to be chosen in either of those States [Louisiana or Arkansas], a sinister light will be cast on [his] motives." They alleged that "a more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people has never been perpetrated." They stigmatized this "rash and fatal act" as "a blow at the friends of the administration, at the rights of humanity, and at the principles of republican government." They warned Mr. Lincoln that, if he wished the support of Congress, he must "confine himself to his executive duties,—to obey and execute, not make the laws; to suppress by arms armed rebellion, and leave political reorganization to Congress." If they really meant what they said, or any considerable part of it, they would have been obliged to vote "Guilty" had the House of Representatives seen fit to put these newspaper charges of theirs into the formal shape of articles of impeachment against the President.