Lincoln Part 46

For these successes Republicans gave much credit to Lincoln's public letters-to the Conkling letter in particular, but also to those addressed to Corning and Birchard concerning Vallandigham and to Seymour concerning the draft. These letters were considered so effective that they were collected and republished for wide circulation as The Letters of President Lincoln on Questions of National Policy in a twenty-two-page pamphlet, which sold for 8 cents a copy. No one could measure their impact on the voters, but Governor Israel Washburn, reporting "the square and unqualified support" of the administration in the Maine election, wrote the President that his letter to Conkling "aided not a little in swelling our wonderful majority."

As news of further Republican victories became known, Lincoln enjoyed a burst of unaccustomed popularity. The Chicago Tribune, so often critical of the President and his administration, now called him "the most popular man in the United States" and flatly predicted: "Were an election for President to be held tomorrow, Old Abe would, without the special aid of any of his friends, walk over the course, without a compet.i.tor to dispute with him the great prize which his masterly ability, no less than his undoubted patriotism and unimpeachable honesty, have won."

VII

During the fall of 1863 there was, apart from the campaigns around Chattanooga, a lull in the war. The federal fleet, under Admiral Dahlgren, continued to bombard the fortifications of Charleston harbor but without decisive results. In northern Virginia, Meade followed a strategy of maneuver and minor engagement with Lee, with no major battle in prospect. The President, for once, had time on his hands, and he busied himself with such matters as an interview with a Mrs. Hutter, who had invented some earm.u.f.fs she wanted to introduce into the service, and a recommendation for "one of Mrs. L's numerous cousins" for a job in the Treasury Department.

When Mary returned refreshed from her vacation in the mountains, a normal social life began again at the White House. The Lincolns began going to the theater again, seeing Maggie Mitch.e.l.l's performance of Fanchon, the Cricket at Ford's Theatre. But, pleading a diplomatic indisposition, Mary did not accompany her husband when he attended the wedding of Kate Chase, daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, to Senator William Sprague, the millionaire Rhode Island manufacturer, on November 12. She regarded Kate, who was younger, prettier, and slimmer, as a rival for the social leaders.h.i.+p of the capital and rightly suspected that she was promoting her father's presidential prospects. To compensate for his wife's absence, Lincoln stayed for an unusually long time at the wedding.

In this period of relative quiet the President allowed his thoughts to turn to making another public statement-this time something less defensive than his extraordinarily successful letters to Corning, Birchard, Seymour, and Conkling, something that would explain to the American people the significance of the huge war into which they had stumbled. Lincoln had been brooding over this idea for some time. Shortly after the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg reached Was.h.i.+ngton, he responded to a group of serenaders by pointing out how appropriate it was that the Union victory occurred on the nation's birthday. What better way was there to celebrate that day when-"How long ago is it?-eighty odd years-since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, a.s.sembled and declared as a self-evident truth that 'all men are created equal.'" The root of the rebellion was "an effort to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal," and now it had suffered major defeats on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But the President's thoughts were not yet sufficiently matured for full expression, and he concluded, "Gentlemen, this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion."

During the following months the larger significance of the war was never far from Lincoln's mind. The need for a broad statement on the subject began to seem more and more pressing as Northerners, convinced by the victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg that the end of the war was in sight, began debating the terms on which the Southern states should be restored to the Union. Many urged the President to address the people directly on these issues, describing the significance of the conflict and explaining why the enormous sacrifices required by the war were worthwhile. Even before the news from Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Horace Greeley, impressed by Lincoln's letter to the Albany Democrats, begged the President to write such a "greatly needed" letter "on the causes of the War and the necessary conditions of Peace." From Boston, the wealthy merchant and railroad man John Murray Forbes suggested that the President should address "the public mind of the North and of such part of the South as you can reach" on the basic issue of the war, which he saw as not just a contest of "North against South but the People against the Aristocrats." If Lincoln would seize every opportunity to hammer home the simple idea "that we are fighting for Democracy or (to get rid of the technical name) for liberal inst.i.tutions," Forbes predicted, "the Rebellion will be crushed."

In November, after the elections, the opportunity came to do just what Forbes had urged. The President was invited to attend the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, where the thousands of men killed in that battle, imperfectly identified and hastily buried, were being reinterred. The orator for the occasion, Edward Everett, the former president of Harvard College, former United States senator, and former Secretary of State, could be counted on to give an extended speech. The President was asked, "as Chief Executive of the nation, formally [to] set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks." The invitation to the President was not an afterthought on the part of David Wills and the other members of the Gettysburg Cemetery Commission; to make sure that their letter would be favorably received, they doubtless preceded it by informal contacts through Ward Hill Lamon, who was known to be an intimate of the President, and they probably chose Lamon to be grand marshal of the procession at Gettysburg just for this reason.

Lincoln accepted, and during the following weeks he gave much thought to the brief remarks that he would make on November 19. He took the a.s.signment very seriously and in the course of his preparation called to the White House William Saunders, the landscape architect in charge of planning the Gettysburg cemetery, in order to learn the topography of a place he had never visited but knew well from his commanders' reports of the great battle. Using White House stationery, Lincoln began writing out an address expressing the ideas he had voiced in his brief response to the serenade after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. By this time the President had his facts straight. No longer did he refer to the Declaration of Independence as having been written "about eighty years ago"; now he wrote without hesitation, "Four score and seven years ago." For the most part, the writing went smoothly and without interruptions-a sure sign that he had carefully reflected on his words-but toward the end of the first page of the short address Lincoln faltered after writing "It is rather for us, the living, to stand here...," crossed out the last three words, and subst.i.tuted "we here be dedicated." He had trouble with the ending, and shortly before he went to Gettysburg he told James Speed that he had found time to write only about half of his address.

But he had the rest of it in his mind before he left the White House on November 18 and needed only a few quiet minutes to write it all out. He chose his words deliberately, preferring, as he always did, short words to long, words of Anglo-Saxon origin to those of Latin derivation. From the first two rhyming words-"Four score"-the cadences were somberly musical, and his gravely repet.i.tive phrases-"we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate-we can not hallow"-had a solemnity worthy of the occasion. Ant.i.thesis was his basic rhetorical strategy, contrasting the living with the dead, "what we say here" with "what they [the soldiers] did here." He did not strive for novelty in language but drew, consciously or unconsciously, on the stores of his memory. Many of his phrases had echoes of the King James version of the Bible. His closing promise of survival for "government of the people, by the people, for the people" may have had its origin in Daniel Webster's 1830 speech calling the American government "made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people," but more probably he derived it from a sermon of Theodore Parker, to which Herndon had called his attention, defining democracy as "a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people." Lincoln had made earlier use of the idea in his July 1861 message to Congress when he referred to the United States as "a democracy-a government of the people, by the same people."

Moving from past to present to future, Lincoln's address a.s.sumed an hourgla.s.s form: an opening account of the events of the past that had led up to the battle of Gettysburg; three brief sentences on the present occasion; and a final, more expansive view of the nation's future. His tone was deliberately abstract; he made no specific reference to either the battle of Gettysburg or of the cemetery that he was dedicating, he did not mention the South or the Confederacy, and he did not speak of the Army of the Potomac or of its commanders. He was deliberately moving away from the particular occasion to make a general argument.

Lincoln read his draft to no one before he reached Gettysburg, and he explained to no one why he had accepted the invitation to attend the dedication ceremonies or what he hoped to accomplish in his address. Yet his text suggested his purpose. When he drafted his Gettysburg speech, he did not know for certain what Edward Everett would say, but he could safely predict that this conservative former Whig would stress the ties of common origin, language, belief, and law shared by Southerners and Northerners and appeal for a speedy restoration of the Union under the Const.i.tution. Everett's oration could give another push to the movement for a negotiated peace and strengthen the conservative call for a return to "the Union as it was," with all the const.i.tutional guarantees of state sovereignty, state rights, and even state control over domestic inst.i.tutions, such as slavery.

Lincoln thought it important to antic.i.p.ate this appeal by building on and extending the argument he had advanced in his letter to Conkling against the possibility of a negotiated peace with the Confederates. In the Gettysburg address he drove home his belief that the United States was not just a political union, but a nation-a word he used five times. Its origins antedated the 1789 Const.i.tution, with its restrictions on the powers of the national government; it stemmed from 1776. It was with the Declaration of Independence that "our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." This was, of course, not a new idea for Lincoln; his first inaugural address carefully developed the thesis that the Union was older than the Const.i.tution. Nor was it an original contribution to American political discourse. It had been an essential part of the ideology of the Whig party, which had been elaborated by Daniel Webster; indeed, almost any advocate of a broad construction of the powers of the federal government was forced to appeal from the constraints of the Const.i.tution to the liberties of the Declaration.

In invoking the Declaration now, Lincoln was reminding his listeners-and, beyond them, the thousands who would read his words-that theirs was a nation pledged not merely to const.i.tutional liberty but to human equality. He did not have to mention slavery in his brief address to make the point that the Confederacy did not share these values. Instead, in language that evoked images of generation and birth-using what the Democratic New York World caustically called "obstetric a.n.a.logies"-he stressed the role of the Declaration in the origins of the nation, which had been "conceived in Liberty" and "brought forth" by the attending Founding Fathers. Now the sacrifices of "the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here" on the battlefield at Gettysburg had renewed the power of the Declaration. "The last full measure of devotion" which they gave made it possible to "highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain" and to pledge "that this nation, under G.o.d, shall have a new birth of freedom."

Compressed into 272 words, Lincoln's message was at once a defense of his administration, an explanation why the war with its attendant horrors had to continue, and a pledge that because of these exertions "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

For all Lincoln's careful preparation, it seemed for a while that he might not be able to attend the dedication ceremonies. On the day he was scheduled to go to Gettysburg, Tad was ill, too sick to eat his breakfast, and Mary Lincoln, recalling the deaths of her other boys, became hysterical at the thought that her husband would leave her at such a critical time. But so important was the occasion and so weighty was the message he intended to deliver that he brushed aside his wife's pleas and about noon left Was.h.i.+ngton on a special train of four cars. All the members of the cabinet had been invited to attend the ceremonies, but only Seward, Blair, and Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher were able to accompany the President. The presence of only the more conservative members of the administration in the President's entourage caused derisive comment in Was.h.i.+ngton, where United States Treasurer Francis E. Spinner guffawed, "Let the dead bury the dead." The party also included Nicolay and Hay, the President's secretaries; William Johnson, Lincoln's black manservant; Benjamin B. French, who had written a hymn to be performed at the ceremonies; the ubiquitous Lamon; members of the diplomatic corps; and some foreign visitors, along with the Marine Band and a military escort from the Invalid Corps. The President was in good spirits, laughing and joking with his companions on the train. At one stop a beautiful little girl lifted a bouquet of rosebuds to the open window in the President's car, saying with her childish lisp, "Flowrth for the President!" Stepping to the window, Lincoln bent down and kissed the child, saying: "You're a sweet little rose-bud yourself. I hope your life will open into perpetual beauty and goodness."

Arriving about five o'clock at Gettysburg, where David Wills and Edward Everett met his train, Lincoln was relieved to receive a telegram from Stanton: "Mrs. Lincoln informed me that your son is better this evening." After dinner at Wills's impressive mansion, Lincoln was called out to respond to a serenade by the Fifth New York Artillery Band. Never happy at extemporaneous speaking, the President apologized that he had "several substantial reasons" for not making a speech, the chief of which was that he had no speech to make. "In my position," he observed, "it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things." A voice from the crowd said, "If you can help it." "It very often happens," Lincoln responded, "that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all."

Disappointed at hearing only what the Dutch amba.s.sador scornfully called one of Lincoln's "pasquinades," the crowd moved on to serenade Seward, who gave them the kind of speech they wanted, praising the United States as "the richest, the broadest, the most beautiful, the most magnificent, and capable of a great destiny, that has ever been given to any part of the human race." But Seward's tone of reconciliation with the rebellious Southerners as friends and brothers and his insistence that the sole objective of the war was to establish "the principle of democratic government" were not exactly in tune with the message that the President proposed to deliver the next day. Perhaps partly for this reason Lincoln, after working for a while in his room at Wills's house to prepare a clean copy of his remarks, took it over to Seward's room, where he presumably read it to the Secretary.

On the morning of the nineteenth Lincoln, after giving the final touches to his address, made a clear copy and appeared at the door of the Wills house at about ten o'clock, dressed in a new black suit, with which the white gauntlets he was wearing sharply contrasted. His stovepipe hat bore a black band, to indicate that he was still mourning the death of his son Willie. After he mounted his horse, which some observers thought too small for so tall a man, there was a considerable delay before the procession got under way, and the President spent the time shaking hands with the well-wishers who crowded about him. Finally the procession began, with four military bands providing music, and the President, along with his three cabinet officers, representatives of the military, and members of the Cemetery Commission representing the various states, made a slow march of about three-quarters of a mile to the burial ground. Recognizing the solemnity of the occasion, the President appeared somber and absorbed in thought.

At the speakers' platform, where he was joined by several governors of Northern states, Lincoln had to wait again until Edward Everett appeared. The Ma.s.sachusetts orator, who was suffering from bladder trouble, knew that the occasion was going to be physically taxing, and he had arranged for a small tent to be erected at one end of the platform so that he might relieve himself before beginning his oration. After an interminable invocation by the chaplain of the House of Representatives, which the irreverent John Hay called "a prayer which thought it was an oration," Everett began his two-hour address. Contrary to expectations, it was not full of purple pa.s.sages or rhetorical ornamentation. For the most part, it was a clear exposition, based on information provided by General Meade and others, of just what had happened during those fiercely hot three days in July, when the nation's life hung in the balance. Everett had committed his long oration to memory, and most in the audience thought he recited it perfectly, though he himself noted that "parts of the address were poorly memorized, several long paragraphs condensed, [and] several thoughts occurred at the moment as happens generally." Even though many in the audience had been standing for four hours, they listened with absorbed interest, and only toward the end did some break away from the crowd and begin informal exploration of the battlefield. It was a moving address and, according to Benjamin B. French, left "his audience in tears many times during his masterly effort." When Everett concluded, the President pressed his hand with great fervor and said, "I am more than gratified, I am grateful to you."

Then, after French's unmemorable hymn, hastily composed for the occasion, Lamon introduced the President of the United States. With his high, penetrating voice, in which some listeners detected a strong Kentucky accent, Lincoln began. A little restive after Everett's long oration, many in the crowd focused on the unsuccessful efforts of a photographer to get his equipment in place to take a picture of the President. Expecting another long speech, most thought that Lincoln was only getting under way when he pledged "that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" and sat down. So brief were his remarks that those in the audience came away with very different recollections of the occasion-whether Lincoln read his ma.n.u.script or relied on his memory, whether he made gestures, whether he inserted the phrase "under G.o.d" in his promise of a new birth of freedom, whether he was interrupted by applause.

Immediately afterward, Lincoln may have felt that his Gettysburg address was not successful. "Lamon, that speech won't scour!" he is supposed to have said, referring to the plows used on the western prairies that failed to turn back the heavy soil and allowed it to collect on the blade. If he felt disappointment, it may have been because during so short an address there was no time to build up the sort of rapport that a speaker needs with his audience, and its abrupt ending left listeners with a sense of being let down. No doubt his judgment was also affected by his fatigue and by illness, which would prostrate him by the time he returned to the White House.

But responses to his address quickly made it clear that, however his words affected his immediate audience, they reached the general public. Most newspapers reporting the Gettysburg ceremonies properly devoted most of their attention to Everett's oration, but praise for the President's address mounted. "The dedicatory remarks by President Lincoln will live among the annals of man," announced the Chicago Tribune, in one of the earliest expressions of appreciation. In the Was.h.i.+ngton Chronicle, John W. Forney wrote that Lincoln's address, "though short, glittered with gems, evincing the gentleness and goodness of heart peculiar to him." The Springfield (Ma.s.sachusetts) Republican carried a more extensive evaluation, probably written by Josiah G. Holland, who called Lincoln's "little speech ... deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma." "We know not where to look for a more admirable speech than the brief one which the President made," declared the Providence Journal, asking whether "the most elaborate and splendid oration [could] be more beautiful, more touching, more inspiring, than those thrilling words of the President." "The few words of the President were from the heart to the heart," wrote George William Curtis, the editor of Harper's Weekly, who called the address "as simple and felicitous and earnest a word as was ever spoken."

The impact of the speech could be measured in the number of times that the President was asked to provide autograph copies of his Gettysburg address. There are at least five copies in Lincoln's own handwriting-more than for any other doc.u.ment Lincoln wrote-and doubtless others have been lost.

Another measure of its significance was the criticism that opponents leveled against it. The earliest attacks simply condemned "the silly remarks of the President," but abler critics recognized the importance of Lincoln's argument. Accusing the President of "gross ignorance or willful misstatement," the New York World sharply reminded him that "This United States" was not the product of the Declaration of Independence but "the result of the ratification of a compact known as the Const.i.tution," a compact that said nothing whatever about equality. Similarly Wilbur F. Storey of the ultra-Democratic Chicago Times recognized that in invoking the Declaration of Independence Lincoln was announcing a new objective in the war. Calling the Gettysburg address "a perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful," Storey insisted that the officers and men who gave their lives at Gettysburg died "to uphold this const.i.tution, and the Union created by it," not to "dedicate the nation to 'the proposition that all men are created equal.'" The bitterness of these protests was evidence that Lincoln had succeeded in broadening the aims of the war from Union to Equality and Union.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Greatest Question Ever Presented to Practical Statesmans.h.i.+p

Lincoln returned from Gettysburg with a fever, and his doctor put him to bed, diagnosing varioloid, a mild variant of smallpox. For the next three weeks he remained under quarantine in the White House, seeing few visitors and transacting little public business. But he remained in good spirits, and newspapers reported that he was able to joke that his illness gave him an answer to the incessant demands of office-seekers. "Now," he is supposed to have said, "I have something I can give everybody."

His convalescence gave him an opportunity to reflect on the tasks that still lay ahead of him. The most immediate of these was the drafting of his annual message to Congress, which a.s.sumed great importance because it would deal with the th.o.r.n.y question of the terms on which the rebellious Southern states could be restored to the Union. This, the President believed, was "the greatest question ever presented to practical statesmans.h.i.+p." Intertwined with this issue was rivalry over the next Republican presidential nomination. And affecting all were the operations of the Union armies. If the armies continued to be victorious and if the President could secure the united backing of his party, the prospects for his reelection and for his program of reconstruction were good.

I

In the fall of 1863, Lincoln occupied a commanding political position. His recent public letters had done much to rally public opinion behind his administration. The fall elections demonstrated the strength of his popular following and the resilience of his party. In military affairs, too, things were looking up. In November decisive Union victories of Grant, Sherman, and George H. Thomas at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge pushed the rebels out of most of Tennessee and opened the way for a drive into Georgia, the heartland of the Confederacy. In foreign affairs as well the administration scored victories. In September the decision of the British government to seize the formidable rams being built for the Confederacy in the Laird s.h.i.+pyards ended the last major threat to the Union blockade and vindicated Lincoln's and Seward's diplomacy. That same month the arrival of Russian fleets at Atlantic and Pacific ports, sent in reality to keep them from being bottled up in the Baltic in the event of a likely war with Great Britain, suggested to most Americans that the Czar's sympathy for the Union cause would lead him to block any British or French intervention in the American Civil War. To celebrate this unlikely liaison between the most autocratic and the most democratic rulers in the world, the Lincolns gave a reception for the Russian visitors, who, as John Hay commented, were "fiendishly ugly," and demonstrated "vast absorbent powers."

To be sure, the President would have to work with reduced majorities in the Thirty-eighth Congress, scheduled to a.s.semble in December, whose members.h.i.+p reflected Republican defeats in the 1862 elections, but it was possible that a smaller group of Republicans might give him more consistent support than the unwieldy majorities of the previous Congress. Throughout the fall Lincoln closely monitored the preliminary steps toward the organization of the new Congress. Warned that Emerson Etheridge, the clerk of the House of Representatives, was planning to take advantage of a technicality and refuse to accept the credentials of Republican congressmen, thus throwing the organization of the House into the hands of the Democratic minority, the President urgently wrote Republican leaders in all the Northern states to make sure that representatives arrived in Was.h.i.+ngton with impeccably correct credentials. He insisted that all Republican members should be present on the day the House was organized. If Etheridge persisted in his scheme, the President remarked grimly, he would "be carried out on a chip," and he promised to have a troop of soldiers ready to a.s.sist.

With that danger, real or imaginary, averted, the President turned his attention to the election of a new Speaker of the House. The leading candidate was Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, whom Lincoln considered "a little intriguer,-plausible but not trustworthy." In addition, the President remembered that Colfax had been the special protege of Secretary Chase, Horace Greeley, and other Radical Republicans. For a time he put his hopes on Frank Blair-the brother of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair-who had recently been reelected to Congress from Missouri as a Conservative Republican but had strong ties to War Democrats throughout the North. The selection of Blair would give Lincoln a Congress controlled by a centrist coalition. It would, in effect, ratify the transformation of the Republican party into a National Union party, a change that the President's strongest supporters had for some time been advocating.

The problem was that Blair was also a major general in Sherman's army in Tennessee. Lincoln urged him to "come here, put his military commission in my hands, take his seat, go into caucus with our friends, abide the nominations, help elect the nominees, and thus aid to organize a House of Representatives which will really support the government in the war." If elected Speaker, Blair would preside over a House majority that would strongly back the President's policies; if defeated, he could resume his commission and rejoin the army. But when Blair, who was in hot pursuit of the Confederates in eastern Tennessee, did not arrive in Was.h.i.+ngton in time for the organization of Congress, Lincoln quietly began to campaign for the selection of his old friend Illinois Representative E. B. Washburne as Speaker. After Washburne's candidacy failed to take off, the President invited Colfax to the White House and secured from the slippery Indiana congressman what was not exactly a pledge of support but a promise of neutrality in the upcoming fights in Congress between Radicals and Conservatives.

Those contests, it was clear, would center on how to restore the Southern states to the Union. This was not a new problem for Lincoln. In a sense he had been dealing with it since the outbreak of the war. Early in the conflict his use of federal troops to hold Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri in the Union had brought about a reorganization of the governments of those states and a change in the relations.h.i.+p between local and national authorities. In 1862 he had taken a further step toward reconstruction by appointing military governors for Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and North Carolina. But these had been essentially military measures, designed primarily to end the war. Now, after the decisive Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, when the collapse of the Confederacy seemed imminent, pressure grew for a clear statement of the terms of reconstruction.

Lincoln was aware of three possible plans. The first was advocated by Democrats ranging from the pro-Confederate Fernando Wood of New York to the staunchly Unionist Reverdy Johnson of Maryland; it called for the President to withdraw the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation and to offer a general amnesty to the rebels. The Southern states, which had never legally been out of the Union, would simply send new congressmen to Was.h.i.+ngton, and the war would be over.

Conservative Republicans made Liberty as well as Union their war aim. Apart from insisting on the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, they favored generous terms for the conquered South. Seward let it be known that he hoped that no conditions, beyond the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves, would be imposed on the returning rebels, and his powerful friend Thurlow Weed believed that Southern planters, mostly former Whigs like himself, would recognize the impending defeat of the Confederacy and lead their states back into the Union. Montgomery Blair wanted the President to appeal to the small farmers of the South to overthrow their slaveholding leaders.h.i.+p and return to the Union. The Postmaster General also favored the compulsory deportation and colonization of the freed blacks.

Radical Republicans sought to add Equality as a third war aim. Most called for a drastic reorganization of Southern social and economic life before the rebellious states could be readmitted. Thaddeus Stevens, the powerful head of the House Ways and Means Committee, favored treating the South as a conquered province, wholly subject to the legislative will of the Congress. In a more elaborate argument, Charles Sumner maintained that the rebellion had vacated all government in the South and the region now fell under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress, like any other national territory. It followed that slavery, which could not exist without the protection of positive law, was abolished in the entire region-not merely in the more limited areas designated in Lincoln's Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation. It was the duty of the Congress to ensure that all citizens in the South, regardless of race, were guaranteed the equal protection of the law. Moreover, Sumner argued, "as a restraint upon the lawless vindictiveness and inhumanity of the Rebel States," Southern lands should be "divided among patriot soldiers, poor whites, and freedmen."

These differences over reconstruction had been simmering for months, but the division among Republicans became public in October, when Sumner articulated his plan in an unsigned article, "Our Domestic Relations," published in the influential Atlantic Monthly. Blair, irritated by Sumner's arguments and further angered because the Radical congressional candidate, Henry Winter Davis, was threatening the Blair family's hegemony in Maryland, countered in a public address at Rockville, Maryland, on October 3. "The revolutionary schemes of the ultra abolitionists," he charged, led to the eradication of the const.i.tutional rights of the states and promoted the "amalgamation" of the black and white races. The best policy of reconstruction was to entrust government in the rebellious states to loyal men and then restore each Southern state to "its place in the councils of the nation with all its attributes and rights." To Sumner's claim that Congress alone had power to manage reconstruction, Blair replied that the "safe and healing policy of the President" was the proper way to restore the Union.

In the fierce controversy that erupted after Blair's speech, Lincoln stayed carefully neutral. No doubt he was aware of the speculation, reported by a Was.h.i.+ngton insider, that Blair's address had been made "by the authority of the President as a faithful exposition of his views; or... [was] instigated by him with a view to feel the public pulse," but he neither avowed nor repudiated the ideas of his Postmaster General. He did not join Connecticut Senator James Dixon in praise of Blair's "words of truth and wisdom" in exposing "Sumner's heresies," but he did not endorse Thaddeus Stevens's denunciation of Blair as "this apostate," whose address was "much more infamous than any speech yet made by a Copperhead orator."

The whole argument, Lincoln felt, was "one of mere form and little else." He was certain that Blair, for all his insistence that the people of the Southern states must control their own destinies, would not agree to admit Jefferson Davis to a seat in Congress as a representative of Mississippi, and he was equally confident that Sumner, once the loyal people of Southern states gained direction of their own affairs, would not exclude their representatives from Congress. Avoiding a theoretical argument over whether control of reconstruction belonged to the President or to Congress, he was confident that there could be "little difference among loyal men" over the practical issue of keeping "the rebellious populations from overwhelming and outvoting the loyal minority."

In his sickroom the President began working on an annual message to Congress that would avoid both extreme Republican positions. In preparing it he sought the advice of his cabinet, securing statistics on the army from Stanton and suggestions from Chase about details of his reconstruction program. The first half of the message was simply a pasting together of paragraphs submitted by the several heads of departments, summarizing their work during the past twelve months and referring to their longer official reports, which were published separately.