II

The signs of southern disaffection in the fall of 1863 encouraged Lincoln to announce a policy for the reconstruction of recanting Confederates. "Whereas it is now desired by some persons heretofore engaged in said rebellion to resume their allegiance to the United States, and to reinaugrate loyal State governments," declared the president in a proclamation on December 8, he offered pardon and amnesty to such persons

20. Yearns and Barrett, eds., North Carolina Civil War Documentary, 302–4.

21. Richard Bardolph, "Inconstant Rebels: Desertion of North Carolina Troops in the Civil War," North Carolina Historical Review, 41 (1964), 184. See also Marc W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1983), 249–65.

who took an oath of allegiance to the United States and to all of its laws and proclamations concerning slavery. (Confederate government officials and high-ranking military officers were exempted from this blanket offer of amnesty.) Whenever the number of persons in any state taking the oath reached 10 percent of the number of voters in 1860, this loyal nucleus could form a state government which would be recognized by the president. To Congress, of course, belonged the right to decide whether to seat the senators and representatives elected from such states.²²

This deceptively simple document grew from multiple layers of experience and debate during the previous two years. By the end of 1863 a consensus existed among Republicans that the pieces of the old Union could not be cobbled together. One piece lost but not lamented was slavery; another that must go was the prominent role played in southern politics by the old state's-rights secessionists. Beyond this, however, a spectrum of opinions could be found in the Republican party concerning both the process and substance of reconstruction.

Lincoln never deviated from the theory that secession was illegal and southern states therefore remained in the Union. Rebels had temporarily taken over their governments; the task of reconstruction was to return "loyal" officials to power. At one level all Republicans subscribed to this theory of indestructible states in an indissoluble Union; to believe otherwise would stultify their war aims. But at another level, no one could deny that the southern states had gone out of the Union and had formed a new government with all the attributes of a nation. A few radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stevens boldly insisted that they had therefore ceased to exist as legal states. When invaded and controlled by the Union army they became "conquered provinces" subject to the conqueror's will. But most Republicans were unwilling to go this far. Instead, many of them subscribed to one variant or another of a theory that by attempting the treasonable act of secession, southern states had committed "state suicide" (Charles Sumner's phrase) or had "forfeited" their rights as states and reverted to the condition of territories.²³

Discussion of these theories consumed much time and energy in

22. CWL, VII, 53–56.

23. For summaries of these theories see Charles H. McCarthy, Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction (New York, 1901), 190–217; Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago, 1960), 96–119; and Herman Belz, Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War (Ithaca, 1969), 7–13.

Congress. Disliking "pernicious abstraction," Lincoln expressed impatience with this "merely metaphysical question" whether "the seceded States, so called, are in the Union or out of it." Everyone agreed, he said, that they were "out of their proper practical relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government . . . is to again get them into that proper practical relation."²⁴ What Lincoln well understood, but did not acknowledge, was that the "metaphysical question" of reconstruction theories concealed a power struggle between Congress and the Executive over control of the process. If the southern states had reverted to the status of territories, Congress had the right to frame the terms of their readmission under its constitutional authority to govern territories and admit new states. If, on the other hand, the states were indestructible and secession was the act of individuals, the president had the power to prescribe the terms of restoration under his constitutional authority to suppress insurrection and to grant pardons and amnesty.

Underlying this conflict over procedure was a significant difference of opinion about substance. Of Kentucky birth and moderate antislavery persuasion, Lincoln had been a Whig and had maintained cordial relations with southern Whigs and unionists almost to the end in 1861. He believed that these men had been swept into secession against their better judgment and were ready by 1863 to return like prodigal sons. By offering them pardons on the conditions of Union and emancipation, Lincoln hoped to set in motion a snowballing defection from the Confederacy and a state-by-state reconstruction of the Union.

Despite the exclusion of top Confederate leaders from Lincoln's blanket offer of amnesty, his policy would preserve much of the South's old ruling class in power. To most abolitionists and radical Republicans this was unacceptable. They insisted that simply to abolish slavery without also destroying the economic and political structure of the old order would merely convert black people from slaves to landless serfs and leave the political power of the planter class untouched. By restoring property and the franchise to Confederates, said Wendell Phillips, the president's amnesty program "leaves the large landed proprietors of the South still to domineer over its politics, and makes the negro's freedom a mere sham." When these pardoned Confederates gained control of their states, Phillips continued, "the Revolution may be easily checked with the aid of the Administration, which is willing that the negro should be free

24. CWL, VIII, 402–3.

but seeks nothing else for him. . . . What McClellan was on the battlefield—'Do as little hurt as possible!"—Lincoln is in civil affairs—'Make as little change as possible!' "²⁵

Phillips and other radicals envisaged reconstruction as a revolution. "The whole system of the Gulf States [must] be taken to pieces," said Phillips. "The war can be ended only by annihilating that Oligarchy which formed and rules the South and makes the war—by annihilating a state of society." Similar rhetoric came from Chairman Thaddeus Stevens of the House Ways and Means Committee, whom a foreign observer described as "the Robespierre, Danton, and Marat" of this second American Revolution. Reconstruction must "revolutionize Southern institutions, habits, and manners," said Stevens. "The foundation of their institutions . . . must be broken up and relaid, or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain."²⁶

Although Stevens and Lincoln had different visions of the South's future, Congress and Executive had not yet become polarized on this issue. For his part, Lincoln remained flexible toward reconstruction as he had done earlier toward emancipation. While his plan of amnesty and restoration "is the best the Executive can present, with his present impressions," he said, "it must not be understood that no other mode would be acceptable." For their part, most congressional Republicans also entertained a range of shifting and flexible opinions less radical than those of Phillips and Stevens. But many moderates as well as radicals believed that some way must be found to ensure political domination by genuine unionists in the South. They distrusted the sincerity of some of those repentant rebels. And a growing number of Republicans favored at least partial enfranchisement of freed slaves to offset the voting power of former Confederates. "I find," wrote Salmon P. Chase at the end of 1863, "that almost all who are willing to have colored men fight are willing to have them vote."²⁷ Believing that Lincoln lagged

25. Phillips to Benjamin Butler, Dec. 13, 1863, Benjamin Butler Papers, Library of Congress; Phillips to George W. Julian, March 27, 1864, Giddings-Julian Papers, Library of Congress; Liberator, May 20, 1864.

26. Liberator, Aug. 8, 1862; New York Tribune, Jan. 23, 1863; Eric Foner, "Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction," in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (New York, 1974), 154; Fawn M. Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (New York, 1959), 231–32.

27. CWL, VII, 56; Chase to Horace Greeley, Dec. 29, 1863, quoted in Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Jusfice (New York, 1969), 285.

behind them by only a few months on this matter as on emancipation, most Republicans responded favorably at first to his amnesty and reconstruction proclamation. And indeed, about a month later Lincoln did write privately to a New York Republican that, having offered amnesty to whites, he also favored suffrage for blacks, "at least, suffrage on the basis of intelligence and military service."²⁸ Both Lincoln and congressional moderates stepped warily around this issue in public, however. Black men could vote in only six northern states, and the possibility of them doing so elsewhere was no more popular among many northern voters than the prospect of emancipation had been a year or two earlier.

On theoretical and procedural questions, Lincoln and congressional Republicans had also moved closer together by 1863. Several bills to provide territorial governments for rebellious states had come before the previous Congress. More than two-thirds of House Republicans favored this concept. But the remainder along with Democrats and border-state unionists produced enough votes to defeat the one measure that came to a vote. Sobered by this experience, a majority of Republicans turned to a new approach that combined the view of indestructible states with a notion of congressional power to intervene in the affairs of these states under extraordinary circumstances. Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution stipulates that "the United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government." Here was a concept of sufficient ambiguity to attract supporters of various viewpoints. A "republican form of government" might mean Negro suffrage; it could be construed to prohibit slavery; it certainly discountenanced rebellion. And best of all, the Constitution did not state whether Congress or the Executive had the principal responsibility in this matter, and earlier Supreme Court interpretations had suggested dual responsibility. Although the theories of conquered provinces, state suicide, and the like did not disappear, the "republican form of government" clause became by 1863

28. Lincoln to James S. Wadsworth, probably in January 1864, in CWL, VII, 101. Some controversy surrounds the authenticity of this letter, but the doubt focuses on two probably spurious paragraphs that are not quoted here. Even the doubters accept the probable genuineness of the letter's first two paragraphs, including the quotation above. See Ludwell H. Johnson, "Lincoln and Equal Rights: The Authenticity of the Wadsworth Letter," JSH, 32 (1966), 83–87; and Harold M. Hyman, "Lincoln and Equal Rights for Negroes: The Irrelevancy of the 'Wadsworth Letter,' " CWH, 12 (1966), 258–66. Wadsworth was a major general in the Army of the Potomac as well as a leading New York Republican who had been defeated for governor in 1862. He was killed in action on May 6, 1864.

the basis for both presidential and congressional approaches to reconstruction.

In the matter of intervening in the affairs of states the president as commander in chief had an inherent advantage over Congress in time of war. While Congress had debated in 1862, Lincoln had acted. He appointed military governors for the portions of Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas that came under Union control, and he authorized them to prepare for the restoration of civil government. The continuation of active fighting in all three states postponed this prospect for a year or more. But with the capture of Port Hudson, the expulsion of Bragg from Tennessee, and the occupation of Little Rock in the latter part of 1863, Lincoln urged his military governors to begin the process of reconstruction. He intended his amnesty proclamation and 10 percent proposal to serve as "a rallying point—a plan of action."²⁹

Louisiana seemed to offer the best prospect for an early test of Lincoln's policy. Union forces had controlled two of the state's four congressional districts since the spring of 1862. New Orleans contained a cosmopolitan and politically active population which had voted overwhelmingly for Bell or Douglas in 1860. Many wealthy sugar and cotton planters along the bayous had been Whigs and conditional unionists. They readily took the oath of allegiance—if only to obtain trade permits to sell cotton. The light-skinned free black community in New Orleans was well-educated and prosperous, supported a bilingual Republican newspaper during the Union occupation, and furnished two regiments that fought at Port Hudson. In Nathaniel Banks, veteran Republican who commanded the occupation forces, and George F. Shepley, prewar Maine Democrat who became a radical Republican and military governor of occupied Louisiana, Lincoln had political generals eager to aid the reconstruction process.

But the process was slowed by Banks's military campaign to plant the flag in Texas as a warning to France and by the division of unionists into two factions. The first and smaller faction was the planters, many of whom accepted with reluctance the quasi-emancipation imposed by the army (occupied Louisiana had been exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation). This faction sent a delegation to Lincoln in June 1863 urging the election of a new state government under the existing Louisiana constitution. Suspecting that their purpose was to preserve the

29. CWL, VII, 52.

framework of slavery, Lincoln rebuffed them. But these conservatives did not stop trying; the idea of reconstructing the state under the old constitution remained alive.

The second and more dynamic faction was led by lawyers, doctors, and entrepreneurs most of whom had been born in the North or abroad but had resided in New Orleans for many years before the war. They had opposed secession, and some had gone into exile rather than support the Confederacy. They organized a Union Association and proposed to hold a state convention to adopt a new constitution abolishing slavery and ridding the old constitution of other conservative features. Once this was accomplished, an election of state officials and congressmen could be held and a purified Louisiana could rejoin the Union.

In the summer of 1863 Lincoln approved this procedure. But the registration of voters lagged because neither Banks nor Shepley took the matter in hand. "This disappoints me bitterly," Lincoln wrote Banks in November. Though less than half the state was under Union military control, the president did not consider that a reason for delay. "Without waiting for more territory," he told Banks, "go to work and give me a tangible nucleus which the rest of the State may rally around as fast as it can, and which I can at once recognize and sustain as the true State government."³⁰ It was this desire for a prompt beginning that caused Lincoln to fix the "tangible nucleus" at 10 percent of a state's 1860 voters.

Stung by Lincoln's censure, Banks decided to move quickly by military fiat. Instead of organizing an election first of delegates to a constitutional convention, as the Union Association wished, he ordered the election of state officials in February 1864 under the existing constitution, to be followed in April by a convention. To take care of the problem of slavery, Banks simply issued an order declaring the institution "inoperative and void." The planters, he explained in a letter to Lincoln, would accept emancipation by ukase in preference to being compelled to enact it themselves in a new constitution. As for holding a convention first, Banks feared that delegates would debate "every theory connected with human legislation," occasioning "dangerous if not fatal delay." If Lincoln wanted prompt restoration, assured emancipation, and participation by at least 10 percent of the voters, insisted Banks, the election of state officials must be held first and the convention later.

30. Lincoln to Banks, Nov. 5, 1863, ibid., 1–2.

Convinced by these arguments, Lincoln told the general to "proceed with all possible despatch."³¹

The radical unionists in New Orleans were dismayed by this decision. They believed that it cut the ground from under their efforts to create a genuine new order in Louisiana. Indeed, that had been part of Banks's purpose, for he considered the Free State General Committee, recently organized by these unionists, too radical. It advocated a limited Negro suffrage, and one of its conventions had seated delegates from the city's free black community. This went farther than most Louisiana whites were willing to go—and for that matter, farther than many northern whites would accept. The rhetoric of revolution abounded at Free State meetings. The leader of the movement, a Philadelphia-born lawyer named Thomas J. Durant who had lived in New Orleans most of his life, rivaled Wendell Phillips in his enthusiasm for the "great principle of equality and fraternity" on which the new order must be founded. "There could be no middle ground in a revolution. It must work a radical change in society; such had been the history of every great revolution." But Banks also professed to be a student of revolutions, and he drew different lessons from the past. "The history of the world shows that Revolutions which are not controlled, and held within reasonable limits, produce counter Revolutions," he wrote to Lincoln. "We are not likely to prove an exception. . . . If the policy proposed [in Louisiana] is . . . too Radical it will bring a Counter Revolution."³²

Banks's program split the Free State Committee into radical and moderate factions. Each faction plus the conservative planters nominated candidates for governor and other state offices in the February 22 election. Banks and most federal officials in New Orleans supported the moderates, who won with a vote greater than the combined total of the radicals and conservatives. The number of votes cast in this election amounted to nearly a quarter of the total recorded for the entire state in 1860.

It seemed a triumph for Lincoln's 10 percent policy. Meanwhile in Arkansas a convention of unionists representing half the state's counties adopted a new constitution repudiating secession and abolishing slavery.

31. Banks to Lincoln, Dec. 30, 1863, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; Lincoln to Banks, Jan. 13, 1864, CWL, VII, 123–24.

32. Quotations from Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, 1978), 197, 228; Banks to Lincoln, Dec. 30, 1863, Lincoln Papers.

A vote equal to almost one-quarter of the 1860 total ratified the constitution and elected a state government in March. But this success remained almost unnoticed in the shadow cast by events in Louisiana—and in Tennessee, where quarrels between iron-clad unionists and recanting Confederates delayed action through most of 1864. This problem plus continuing controversy over affairs in Louisiana drove a wedge into the Republican party that threatened a serious split between the president and Congress. Four related issues emerged in this conflict: the fate of slavery; the political role of blacks in reconstruction; the definition of loyalty; and the status of free black labor in the new order. As each issue generated heat in Louisiana, the temperature also rose in Congress where Republican lawmakers sought to frame their own approach to reconstruction.

The doom of slavery was their first concern. As military measures, both Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and Banks's edict declaring slavery "void" in Louisiana would have precarious legal force when the war was over. That was why Louisiana radicals considered a new constitution abolishing slavery a necessary prerequisite to the election of a new state government. Many congressional Republicans also feared a revival of slavery if conservatives should gain control of a reconstructed Louisiana. The best solution for this problem was a national constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. All Republicans including Lincoln united in favor of this in 1864. But the problem persisted. The Senate quickly mustered the necessary two-thirds majority for a Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but Democratic gains in the 1862 congressional elections prevented similar success in the House, where a 93–65 vote for the Amendment on June 15 fell thirteen votes short of success. In an attempt to ensure that emancipation became part of reconstruction, therefore, the Wade-Davis bill³³ passed by Congress on July 2 included a provision outlawing slavery in Confederate states as a condition of their return to the Union.

Fears that moderates and conservatives in Louisiana might make a deal to preserve slavery proved groundless. Despite the refusal of many radicals to participate in the election of a convention in March 1864,

33. Named for Benjamin Wade, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, and Henry Winter Davis, chairman of a special House reconstruction committee. Both were radicals. Davis was from Maryland—a significant sign of how the war had revolutionized that border state. On June 24, 1864, a state constitutional convention in Maryland adopted an amendment abolishing slavery, which voters narrowly ratified on October 13.

that body, meeting from April to July, wrote a prohibition of slavery into Louisiana's fundamental law. It also mandated public schools for all children, opened the militia to blacks, and provided equal access to the courts for both races. In the context of Louisiana's previous history, these were indeed revolutionary achievements. Lincoln described the constitution as "excellent . . . better for the poor black man than we have in Illinois."³⁴

But on the matter that would emerge as the central issue of postwar reconstruction, Negro suffrage, the convention balked. A Louisiana moderate probably spoke with accuracy when he said that scarcely one in twenty white men favored suffrage even for literate, cultured Creoles—much less for newly freed field hands. Nevertheless, pressures for enfranchisement of blacks continued to grow. Abolitionists and radicals won converts among congressional Republicans with their argument that it was not only immoral but also fatuous to grant the ballot to former rebels and withhold it from loyal blacks. In January 1864 the "free people of color" in New Orleans drew up a petition asking for the right to vote. This memorial bore the signatures of more than a thousand men. Twenty-seven of them had fought with Andrew Jackson to defend New Orleans against the British in 1815; many others had sons or brothers in the Union army. Two delegates carried the petition to Washington, where radical congressmen praised them and Lincoln welcomed them to the White House. Impressed by their demeanor, the president wrote to the newly elected governor of Louisiana, Michael Hahn, a letter whose diffident wording conveyed a plain directive. When the forthcoming convention took up the question of voter qualifications, said Lincoln, "I barely suggest for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty in the family of freedom." Hahn and Banks got the message. But persuading a convention of Louisiana whites, even unionists who had swallowed emancipation, to confer political equality on blacks was uphill work. The best that the governor and general could do by cajolery, threats, and patronage was to reverse an initial vote for a clause forbidding Negro suffrage and secure instead a clause authorizing the legislature to enfranchise blacks if it saw fit.³⁵

34. CWL, VIII, 107.

35. Lincoln to Hahn, March 13, 1864, CWL, VII, 243. See also McCrary, Lincoln and Reconstruction, 256–63; LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Columbia, S.C., 1981), 92; and Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge, 1984), 36–65.

Unaware of these efforts by Banks and Hahn, several radicals denounced the Louisiana constitution for its "spirit of caste." Regarding Louisiana as "Mr. Lincoln's model of reconstruction . . . which puts all power in the hands of an unchanged white race," a number of congressional Republicans turned against Lincoln's policy in the spring of 1864.³⁶ Yet in the matter of Negro suffrage, Congress could do no better. The initial version of the House reconstruction bill included a requirement for the registration of "all loyal male citizens." This phrase had become a Republican code for black enfranchisement. But moderates were not ready for such a step, so they modified the bill by adding the word "white." When the measure came to the Senate, Benjamin Wade's Committee on Territories deleted "white." But after counting heads, Wade added it again before passage on July 2 "because, in my judgment, [black suffrage] will sacrifice the bill."³⁷ Some radicals expressed outrage at such a surrender to expediency. "And this is called 'guaranteeing to the States a Republican form of Government,' is it?" said one abolitionist sarcastically, while a radical newspaper in Boston commented that "until Congress has sense enough and decency enough to pass bills without the color qualification, we care not how quickly they are killed."³⁸

The Negro suffrage issue was part of a larger debate over who constituted the "loyal" population of a state for purposes of reconstruction. Radicals considered blacks and unionist whites who had never supported the Confederacy to be the only true loyalists. Some moderates went along with Lincoln in wishing to include whites who repudiated their allegiance to the Confederacy and took an oath of future loyalty to the Union. But the unionism of these "galvanized" rebels was suspect in the eyes of many Republicans, who therefore wanted to enfranchise blacks to ensure a unionist majority. If blacks could not vote, then neither should recanting whites—at least not until the war was won and all danger of their relapse into rebellion was over. Moreover, congressional Republicans considered 10 or even 25 percent of a state's white voters

36. Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom, 104; McCrary, Lincoln and Reconstruction, 271–72.

37. CC, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 3449. See also Belz, Reconstructing the Union, 183, 201–2, 217.

38. Principia, May 12, 1864; Boston Commonwealth, July 15, 1864.

too slender a basis for reconstruction—especially when, as they saw it, that process in Louisiana had been "imposed on the people by military orders under the form of elections." In the words of Henry Winter Davis, chairman of the House reconstruction committee, the new government in New Orleans was a "hermaphrodite government, half military and half republican, representing the alligators and frogs of Louisiana."³⁹

The fourth area of contention concerned the degree of freedom in the free-labor system to replace slavery. "Any provision which may be adopted . . . in relation to the freed people" by new state governments, declared Lincoln in his proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction, "which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for their education, and which may yet be consistent, as a temporary arrangement, with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class, will not be objected to by the national Executive."⁴⁰ Here in a nutshell was the problem that would preoccupy the South for generations after the war. How "temporary" would this suggested system of apprenticeship turn out to be? What kind of education would freed slaves receive? How long would their status as a "laboring, landless, and homeless class" persist? These were questions that could not be fully resolved until after the war—if then. But they had already emerged in nascent form in the army's administration of contraband affairs in the occupied South.

From Maryland to Louisiana several hundred thousand contrabands came under Union army control during the war. Many of them had uprooted themselves—or had been uprooted—from their homes. The first task was to provide them food and shelter. The army was ill-equipped to function as a welfare agency. Its main task was to fight the rebels; few soldiers wanted to have anything to do with contrabands except perhaps to exploit them or vent their dislike of them. Thousands of blacks huddled in fetid "contraband camps" where disease, exposure, malnutrition, and poor sanitation took an appalling toll that accounted for a large share of the civilian casualties suffered by the South.

A degree of order gradually emerged from this chaos. Northern philanthropy stepped into the breach and sent clothing, medicine, emergency economic aid, and teachers to the contrabands. Supported by the American Missionary Association, the National Freedmen's Relief Association, the New England Freedmen's Aid Society, the Western

39. New York Tribune, Aug. 5, 1864; CG, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., 682.

40. CWL, VII, 55.

Freedmen's Aid Commission, and many other such organizations both religious and secular, hundreds of missionaries and schoolma'ams followed Union armies into the South to bring material aid, spiritual comfort, and the three Rs to freed slaves. Forerunners of a larger invasion that occurred after the war, these emissaries of Yankee culture—most of them women—saw themselves as a peaceful army come to elevate the freedmen and help them accomplish the transition from slavery to a prosperous freedom.

Of predominantly New England heritage and abolitionist conviction, these reformers exerted considerable influence in certain quarters of the Union government. In 1863 they persuaded the War Department to create a Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, whose recommendations eventually led to establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau in the last days of the war. They also managed to secure the appointment of sympathetic army officers to administer freedmen's affairs in several parts of the occupied South—particularly General Rufus Saxton on the South Carolina sea islands and Colonel John Eaton, whom Grant named superintendent of contrabands for the Mississippi Valley in November 1862. By 1863 the army had gotten many of the freedmen out of the contraband camps and put them to work on "home farms" to provide some of their own support. The army also hired many able-bodied freedmen as laborers and recruited others into black regiments, one of whose functions was to protect contraband villages and plantations from raids by rebel guerrillas or harassment by white Union soldiers.

The need of northern and British textile mills for cotton also caused the army to put many freed people to work growing cotton—often on the same plantations where they had done the same work as slaves. Some of these plantations remained in government hands and were administered by "labor superintendents" sent by northern freedmen's aid societies. Others were leased to Yankee entrepreneurs who hoped to make big money raising cotton with free labor. Still others remained in the hands of their owners, who took the oath of allegiance and promised to pay wages to workers who had recently been their slaves. Some land was leased by the freedmen themselves, who farmed it without direct white supervision and in some cases cleared a handsome profit that enabled them subsequently to buy land of their own. The outstanding example of a self-governing black colony occurred at Davis Bend, Mississippi, where former slaves of the Confederate president and his brother leased their plantations (from the Union army, which had seized them) and made good crops.

The quality of supervision of contraband labor by northern superintendents, Yankee lessees, and southern planters ranged from a benign to a brutal paternalism, prefiguring the spectrum of labor relations after the war. Part of the freedmen's wages was often withheld until the end of the season to ensure that they stayed on the job, and most of the rest was deducted for food and shelter. Many contrabands, understandably, could see little difference between this system of "free" labor and the bondage they had endured all their lives. Nowhere was the apparent similarity greater than in occupied Louisiana, where many planters took the oath of allegiance and continued to raise cotton or sugar under regulations issued by General Banks. Because of the national political focus on the reconstruction process in Louisiana, these regulations became another irritant between radical and moderate Republicans and another issue in the controversy between Congress and president. By military fiat Banks fixed the wages for plantation laborers and promised that the army would enforce "just treatment, healthy rations, comfortable clothing, quarters, fuel, medical attendance, and instruction for children." But further regulations ensured that some of these promises were likely to be honored in the breach. A worker could not leave the plantation without a pass and must sign a contract to remain for the entire year with his employer, who could call on provost marshals to enforce "continuous and faithful service, respectful deportment, correct discipline and perfect subordination." This system amounted to a virtual "reestablishment of slavery," charged abolitionists. It "makes the [Emancipation] Proclamation of 1863 a mockery and delusion," said Frederick Douglass. "Any white man," declared the black newspaper in New Orleans, "subjected to such restrictive and humiliating prohibitions, would certainly call himself a slave." If "this is the definition [of freedom] which the administration and people prefer," observed a radical newspaper in Boston, "we have got to go through a longer and severer struggle than ever."⁴¹

41. Banks's regulations are printed in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 15, pp. 666–67, and Vol. 34, pt. 2, pp. 227–31; the abolitionist and black responses are quoted from James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 290, 293; and McPherson, The Negro's Civil War (New York, 1965), 129–30. The account in the preceding paragraphs of wartime policies toward the freedmen is based on the author's own research and on a number of studies by other scholars, especially Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes 1861–1865 (New Haven, 1938); Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis, 1964); Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks 1861–1865 (Westport, Conn., 1973); Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New Haven, 1980); C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1976); McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction; and Cox, Lincoln and the Freedmen.

Indeed they did, but most of that struggle lay in the post-war future. In 1864 the controversy over freedmen's policy in Louisiana added its force to the process by which Congress hammered out a reconstruction bill. As finally passed after seemingly endless debate, the Wade-Davis bill reached Lincoln's desk on the 4th of July. By limiting suffrage to whites it did not differ from the president's policy. In another important respect—the abolition of slavery—it only appeared to differ. While the bill mandated emancipation and Lincoln's policy did not, the president's offer of amnesty required recipients of pardon to swear their support for all government actions on slavery. The two states thus far "reconstructed," Louisiana and Arkansas, had abolished the institution. Nevertheless a fear persisted among some Republicans that a residue of slavery might survive in any peace settlement negotiated by Lincoln, so they considered abolition by statute vital.

More significant were other differences between presidential and congressional policy: the Wade-Davis bill required 50 percent instead of 10 percent of the voters to swear an oath of allegiance, specified that a constitutional convention must take place before election of state officers, and restricted the right to vote for convention delegates to men who could take the "ironclad oath" that they had never voluntarily supported the rebellion. No Confederate state (except perhaps Tennessee) could meet these conditions; the real purpose of the Wade-Davis bill was to postpone reconstruction until the war was won. Lincoln by contrast wanted to initiate reconstruction immediately in order to convert lukewarm Confederates into unionists as a means of winning the war.⁴²

Lincoln decided to veto the bill. Since Congress had passed it at the end of the session, he needed only to withhold his signature to prevent it from becoming law (the so-called pocket veto). This he did, but he also issued a statement explaining why he had done so. Lincoln denied the right of Congress to abolish slavery by statute. To assert such a right would "make the fatal admission" that these states were out of the Union and that secession was therefore legitimate. The pending Thirteenth Amendment, said the president, was the only constitutional way to abolish

42. CG, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., 2107–8, 3518; Belz, Reconstructing the Union, 241–42.

slavery. Lincoln also refused "to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration" as required by the bill, since this would destroy "the free-state constitutions and governments, already adopted and installed in Arkansas and Louisiana."⁴³

Because Congress had no official way to respond to this quasi-veto message, Wade and Davis decided to publish their own statement in the press. As they drafted it, their pent-up bitterness toward "Executive usurpation" carried them into rhetorical excess. "This rash and fatal act of the President," they declared, was "a blow at the friends of his Administration, at the rights of humanity, and at the principles of Republican Government." The congressional bill, unlike Lincoln's policy, protects "the loyal men of the nation" against the "great dangers" of a "return to power of the guilty leaders of the rebellion" and "the continuance of slavery." The president's cool defiance of this measure was "a studied outrage on the legislative authority." If Lincoln wanted Republican support for his re-election, "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."⁴⁴

That final sentence provides a key to understanding this astonishing attack on a president by leaders of his own party. The reconstruction issue had become tangled with intraparty political struggles in the Republican presidential campaign of 1864. The Wade-Davis manifesto was part of a movement to replace Lincoln with a candidate more satisfactory to the radical wing of the party.