congressmen from that state. On this his language was emphatic: he considered it “disgusting and outrageous ... to send a parcel of Northern men here as representatives, elected, as it would be understood (and perhaps really so), at the point of the bayonet.”

While in this manner disallowing the idea of importing Northern politicians into a Southern state as pseudo-representatives in Congress, he also repudiated the opposite policy of Fernando Wood of New York which would accept Southerners in Congress prematurely — that is, before resistance to the United States was ended and loyalty assured. To mention another point, he had, in considering the formation of the new state of West Virginia, expressed his view that, in the pattern of the Union, only those who were loyal—i. e., who adhered to the United States—could be regarded as competent voters.

To these points — the indispensable Union, loyalty, and the unwisdom of carpetbaggism — one must add Lincoln’s fundamental policy of emancipation and his non-vindictiveness in the matter of confiscation. Taking these factors together the historian has, before December, 1863, the ingredients of the President’s reunion program.

In announcing that program on December 8, 1863, Lincoln issued two documents: a proclamation, and a message to Congress. In his proclamation, having the force of law, he set forth the conditions of a general pardon and the terms of restoring a Southern state to the Union. In his accompanying message he commented upon his plan, telling more fully what was in his mind and defending his course by reason and persuasion. The offer of pardon (with stated exceptions) and restoration of rights (except as to slaves) was given to anyone in a seceded state who would take and keep a simple oath. Phrased by the President, this oath constituted a solemn pledge to support the Constitution of the United States “and the union of the States thereunder.” The oath-taker would also swear to abide by and faithfully support all the acts of Congress and all the proclamations of the President relating to slaves unless repealed, modified, or declared void by the Supreme Court.

So much for the oath, with pardon and restoration of rights. The next element in the proclamation was re-establishment of a state government. This again was intended to be simple and practical. Whenever, in a seceded state, a number not less than one-tenth of those voting in 1860, should re-establish a republican government, such a government, according to Lincoln’s proclamation, would “be recognized as the true government of the State.”

Turning from the proclamation to the simultaneous message, we find Lincoln setting forth the reasons and conditions of his policy. In this he addressed himself to various questions that he knew would arise. What about the oath? Why the ten per cent? What about state laws touching freedmen? Why preserve the state as it was? How about state boundaries? Why was the President assuming the power of reconstruction as an executive function? He started with the obvious unwisdom and

absurdity of protecting a revived state government constructed from the disloyal element. It was essential to have a test “so as to build only from the sound.” He wanted that test to be liberal and to include “sworn recantation of ... former unsoundness.” As for laws and proclamations against slavery, they could not be abandoned. Retaining so far as possible the existing political framework in the state, as Lincoln saw it, would “save labor, and avoid confusion.” He did not, of course, mean by this that the system in any state was to be permanently frozen for the future in unchangeable form.

As to the specific formula of ten per cent, he said little; yet his simile of a rallying point held the key. The important object was to get a movement started. Acceptance of an initial electorate of ten per cent did not signify that Lincoln was favoring minority rule. It was not his thought that any minority should usurp the rights of the majority. Within his pattern of loyalty, Union, non-dictatorial government, and emancipation, he was putting the formation of any new state government in the hands of the loyal people of the state. Government by the people was to him fundamental, but as a practical matter some loyal nucleus was essential; else time would pass, precious time, and nothing would be done.

The whole situation, of course, was abnormal. All beginnings, or re-beginnings, are difficult, especially rebuilding after or during a war, taking up the shattered pieces of a disrupted social and political order and putting them partly together so that ultimately they could be fully restored. Lincoln was willing to accept informality in order to accomplish the main practical purpose which he considered imperative. He was unwilling to throw away the cause while futilely waiting for perfection. Reconstruction, as he saw it, was a matter of stages. His “ten per cent plan” was easy to criticize. Yet it was the first step.

Lincoln would take his first step in the most available manner. A few states could be rebuilt and restored. This was to be done during the war, indeed as an important factor in waging and ending the war. Let people see that Lincoln did not intend an ugly and vindictive policy, and Southerners themselves, the President hoped, would set their own houses in order. Let one or two states do this; they would serve as examples for others as the armies advanced and national authority was extended. In time of war, prepare for peace, was Lincoln’s thought. On the other hand, let the months pass, and let the Southern people witness only carpetbaggism, Federal occupation, and a repressive attitude as to the future, and victory itself would lose much of its value. It was Lincoln’s intent that policy associated with victory should envisage willing loyalty while leaving free play for self government.

II

Lincoln’s plan of reunion was greeted with a mixed response. The Washington Chronicle, regarded as a Lincoln

“organ,” naturally praised the President’s announcement. The editor noted that the President gave out his statement in a setting of military and naval success: our armies victorious, our navy in control of Southern coasts, our cause strengthened by increased friendship of foreign nations. His generous offering of pardon was interpreted by the Chronicle as evidence of his kindness and sympathy toward the people of the South.

An English gentleman friendly to the United States wrote: “We have just received the news of President Lincoln’s message, accompanied with his amnesty; also the message of ... [Jefferson] Davis. The two documents coming together are doing an immense amount of good for the right cause.”

It is doubtful how many readers made the comparison of the two messages, but those who did must have noted a marked difference of tone. In general spirit Lincoln’s message of December 8, 1863, was notable for its absence of war-engendered hatred toward the South, ending as it did on the note of “freedom disenthralled.” In appealing for reunion the President was holding out the hand for genuine renewal of friendly relations. This attitude, however, was not reciprocated by the Confederate President.

Though perhaps the comparison should not be overstressed, one finds quite the opposite note in the message (December 7, 1863) of Jefferson Davis to his Congress. After a depressing account of Confederate military reverses and of discouraging condition in foreign affairs and finance, the Southern Executive threw in bitter denunciations of the “barbarous policy” and “savage ferocity” of “our enemies.” At one point he referred to them as “hardened by crime.” (There were, of course, those in the North, though not Lincoln, who were saying equally hateful things of the South.) That enemy, wrote Davis, refused “even to listen to proposals . . . [of peace] of recognizing the impassable gulf which divides us.” This expression, the orthodox attitude of Confederate officialdom, must be remembered along with Lincoln’s other problems. If anyone doubted why the President, in his reconstruction plans and his wariness toward “peace negotiations,” realized the hopelessness of expecting high Confederate officials to consider a peaceable restoration of the Union, the reading of this message of Davis would have been enough to dispel such doubt.

It was obvious from the start that the President’s plan would not have smooth sailing, but on several fronts steps were taken to make it known and put it into operation. Army officers were instructed to take copies of the proclamation and distribute them so as to reach soldiers and inhabitants within Confederate-held territory. Aid and protection was to be extended to those who would declare loyalty. On the occasion of raids into enemy territory a number of men were to be detailed “for the purpose of distributing the proclamation broadcast among rebel soldiers and people, and in the highways and byways.”

On the legal or prosecuting front the effect of the pardon policy was explained in an instruction from the office of the

attorney general of the United States to district attorneys throughout the country. It was made known that the “President’s pardon of a person guilty of ... rebellion . . . [would] relieve that person for the penalties” of that crime. District attorneys were therefore directed to discontinue proceedings in United States courts whenever the accused should take the oath and comply with the stated conditions.

Such a statement would make it appear that the transition from a kind of rebellious guilt to complete relief from penalty was easy, automatic, and practically instantaneous, but it soon became evident that the matter was not so simple as that. Lincoln found that he had to make a distinction in applying his offer of pardon in return for the oath. What about Confederate soldiers held by Union authorities as prisoners of war? On this point the President issued a letter clarifying the proclamation, declaring that his pardon did not apply to men in custody or on parole as prisoners of war. It did apply, he explained, to persons yet at large (i. e., free from arrest) who would come forward and take the oath. It was also explained that those excluded from the general amnesty could apply to the President for clemency and their cases would have due consideration.

What it amounted to was that Lincoln himself was generous in the application of his pardon both to soldiers and civilians, and the same was true of the attorney general’s office; but army officers were not prepared, in return for the oath, to deliver prisoners nor give up penalties for offences of various sorts, such as violation of rules of war. No one statement applies. Some enemies held as prisoners, on establishing loyalty, were discharged from custody by the President on assurance of good faith by three congressmen. This showed, as in many cases, that Lincoln’s general rules were subject to individual exceptions.

III

With a scorn of fine-spun theories and an urgent wish to get ahead with the job of reconstruction, the President proceeded, so far as possible, to make restoration a reality wherever, and as soon as, any reasonable opportunity offered in the seceded South.

In Lincoln’s plan of reconstruction the effort in Louisiana was of vital importance. From the time that New Orleans fell to Union arms on May 1, 1862, the President saw, in terms of Federal occupation, an early opportunity to make reconstruction a wartime reality. Let Louisiana be restored, he thought, let this be done in a reasonable manner with Washington approval, let it be seen that the plan would work, and other states would follow. To go into all the details of the Louisiana story, treating its complications month by month, would be a tedious process. It will be convenient to reduce this elaborate Louisiana story to four successive phases:

First Phase in Louisiana: Military Rule Under Butler and Shepley . The first phase was that of army rule under General

B. F. Butler. Immediate adjustments were of course necessary from the moment when New Orleans, largest city of the South, together with a large portion of Louisiana, came under the Union flag. Governmental officials in the occupied region, including merely local functionaries in city or parish, were now under Federal authority—not in terms of any deliberation as to procedure by Congress or the Executive, but simply by the fortunes of war. Where men in local office stood ready to co-operate with the occupying power, they had a good chance of being retained; if un-cooperative, they were dismissed. For a time the mayor and council of New Orleans were continued in office subject to General Butler’s authority with some relaxation of military pressure, but this situation did not last long. Within a month the mayor was deposed and imprisoned, and George F. Shepley, acting closely with Butler, took over mayoral functions. Then in June, 1862, Shepley became military governor of Louisiana; soon afterward he had the rank of brigadier general.

This was military occupation, and of course it was intended only as a temporary condition. It amounted to martial law which has been defined as the will of the military commander; this meant that the sometimes eccentric will of General Butler was paramount. If nothing offered in the form of a re-established and recognized state government, the abnormal and temporary regime would continue.

It thus came about that Federal rule in Louisiana, the first step toward what Lincoln regarded as restoration of loyalty and normal conditions, got off to a bad start. The name of “Beast Butler” became a hated byword in the South, with far-reaching complications in Federal-Confederate relations; it came as a considerable relief when President Lincoln removed him from his Louisiana command on December 16, 1862. His successor, as commander of the military forces stationed in Louisiana and Texas, was Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, with Shepley retaining his position as “military governor of Louisiana.”

Under Butler little or nothing had been done toward wartime governmental reconstruction in the state, but this problem, dear to Lincoln’s heart, was tackled under the President’s urging during the Banks-Shepley regime.

A careful study of these matters reveals a problem as to top executive leadership locally applied—that is, the difficulty of achieving effectiveness in a particular area in terms of policy developed in Washington. Lincoln was President; he was the Chief; he made the appointments and formed decisions; presumably he would choose men to put his policies into operation. Yet so unpredictable were events and so complicated was the situation as to politicians’ maneuvers that those who supposedly should have carried out Lincoln’s purposes promoted their own factional and contrary schemes in such manner as to jeopardize the President’s best laid plans.

George F. Shepley was a case in point. He had been a Maine Democrat, an appointee of Pierce and later of Buchanan as district attorney, and a supporter of Douglas in 1860. These factors in his background did

not militate against him in Lincoln’s view—the President often appointed Democrats—nor should they have been a drawback to successful service in Louisiana’s reconstruction. There was, however, the further fact that Shepley became a Butlerite and a Radical; remaining after Butler’s removal, he played the Radical game at a time when it was hoped that a more Lincolnian policy would be inaugurated. Thus Shepley stood as an obstacle to Lincoln’s efforts to allay factionalism and to promote speedy and liberal restoration.

Toward the end of the Butler-Shepley period an election was held within the Union lines on December 3, 1862, for members of Congress from Louisiana. Two men of different outlook were elected: B. F. Flanders from New Hampshire, who was to become an instrument of the Radical faction; and Michael Hahn, a citizen of Louisiana born in Bavaria, who was more in tune with Lincoln’s purposes. When the question of admitting these gentlemen as members of the House of Representatives was brought before that body (February 9, 1863) a species of dog fight ensued, a forerunner of the rough treatment in store for Lincoln’s whole reunion program. Few were ready for frontal attack and sidestepping was more in evidence; the result was confusion, unrelated motions, and postponement. Finally, on February 17, 1863, the House voted, 92 to 44, to seat Flanders and Hahn. By that time that particular Congress, the Thirty-seventh, was about to pass out of existence.

Second Phase: Shepley and Durant versus Banks . In the next phase, while Banks was in top command in Louisiana with Shepley as military governor—i. e., governor as to civil affairs under military authority—certain groups in the state got to work, though at cross purposes, to seize control of the process of state remaking. It turned out to be a period of bickering and futility, a time of bitter disappointment to the President. Taking over the rebuilding task and attempting to do it in his own way, Governor Shepley proceeded to make a registry of voters, appointing T. J. Durant, a Radical like himself, as commissioner of registration. An oath of allegiance was required (this was before the presidentially prescribed oath of December 8, 1863) and the registration of whites who would take the oath was ordered. It was Durant’s idea that ten loyal men in a parish, if no more could be registered, would be a sufficient basis for an election. This was a period when Banks was preoccupied with military command in the Port Hudson and Texas areas, while Shepley was also absent from Louisiana, spending a large part of the summer of 1863 in Washington. Lincoln approved the Shepley-Durant registration and wanted it pushed.

The President was trying to keep himself in the background, to avoid seeming to dictate, and to let things work themselves out as a Louisiana movement. Yet he soon found that a jurisdictional dispute or confusion as to control was spoiling everything. Shepley as military governor and Durant, his appointee, were claiming

“that they were exclusively charged with the work of reconstruction in Louisiana,” while Banks had “not felt authorized to interfere” with them. In a letter of December 16, 1863, Banks advised the President that he was “only in partial command,” adding: “There are not less than four distinct governments here claiming . . . independent powers based upon instructions received directly from Washington, and recognizing no other authority than their own.”

Though this unfortunate situation was due in large part to the activities of Radical groups, another factor may have been a bit of inadvertence on the part of the burdened President: he had supposed all the time that Banks was in chief command but had not made that point sufficiently clear. He now wrote a strong letter to Banks (December 24, 1863) with a fourfold repetition of the main theme: You are master. The President was seriously annoyed at the frustration and delay. Shepley, he wrote, was to “assist” Banks, not to “thwart” him. The desirable object, of course, was to have unity among pro-Union men and leaders, but a serious obstacle to such unity was the attitude of Shepley and his considerable faction. It became increasingly apparent that these Radicals were unwilling to co-operate with the man whom Lincoln had placed in chief authority and whom he had plainly designated as “master.” Treating delay and factionalism as if things of the past, Lincoln wrote to Banks: “Give us a free State reorganization of Louisiana in the shortest possible time.”

Third Phase: The Louisiana Constitution of 1864 . Under Lincoln’s spurring Banks went into action. In January and February of 1864 he issued proclamations for two kinds of elections: an election for governor under the old Louisiana constitution of 1853, and an election of delegates to a convention to make a new state constitution. In his proclamations, copies of which he sent to the President, Banks declared that officials then to be chosen were to govern unless they tried to change Federal statutes as to slavery. Voters were required to take the oath of allegiance to the United States.

Lincoln continued to prod and encourage. Proceed “with all possible dispatch,” wrote the President. “Frame orders, and fix times and places for this and that . . . .” Recognition of the death of slavery in Louisiana was causing less difficulty than might have been expected. While the planter class wanted to keep the institution, they were in the minority; the majority of the people were ready to accept emancipation.

Both of the elections were a success from the standpoint of Banks and of Lincoln. Not that Lincoln considered the outcome perfect, but the whole point of Lincoln’s policy was that he was not expecting perfection. He wanted steps to be taken, a “free” government set up; modifications and improvements could come later. The vote for state officials was held on February 22, 1864. In a total of 11,411 votes (over a fourth of

the normal peacetime vote of Louisiana) Michael Hahn, the moderate Union candidate acceptable to Banks and Lincoln, received 6,183 votes and was elected; Flanders, candidate of the anti-Banks Radical element, received 2,232 votes; J. Q. A. Fellows, nominated by the proslavery conservatives, received the disturbingly large vote of 2,996.

Next came the problem of constitution remaking. By Banks’s proclamation an election was held on March 28, 1864, by which delegates were chosen (not a distinguished lot, but they represented the people rather than officials or politicians) to form a new instrument of government. From April to July the convention labored. Among its main acts was to abolish slavery by a vote of seventy to sixteen. Negro suffrage, then a new question and a difficult one, came harder. After voting it down, the convention reconsidered; it then “empowered” the legislature to grant the vote to colored persons; by the constitution it was provided that a militia be enrolled without distinction of color.

On September 5, 1864, the people of Louisiana voted to ratify the constitution (6,836-1,566); members of Congress were then chosen by popular election, after which the legislature set up under the new constitution chose two senators. If and when these men should be admitted by Congress—a big “if”—reconstruction for Louisiana, so far as essential political structure was concerned, would be complete. In the matter of preliminary steps—shaping up the situation so that Congress could act—the work of the executive branch for this pivotal state was done.

Fourth Phase: Trouble in Congress . Much water was to pass over the mill before one could know what Congress would do as to admitting Louisiana according to Lincoln’s plan. The Radical clique in Louisiana had opposed the measures taken in 1864 looking toward a new state government. This element made a break with the Lincoln Administration, denounced the new constitution as null and void, and proceeded to make their influence felt in Congress. The Radical element in Congress was working strongly against Lincoln’s program in any case, and it was no surprise that the decision of the solons at Washington concerning Louisiana reorganization was negative. A long period of Federal occupation and troublous abnormality was to ensue. There were a number of uneasy years after Lincoln’s death before the state was, one should not say restored, but outfitted with a carpetbag government. After that there was to be further delay—nearly a decade—before that unworkable carpetbag regime collapsed.

Unionism in the South

As in Louisiana, so in other regions of the Confederate South, Lincoln did his best to promote reorganization measures so that state governments could supersede Federal military rule, but wartime conditions made for obstruction and progress was slow. In Tennessee, where secession had been strongly resisted and where Union victories came in February and April of 1862, it might have seemed that a choice opportunity was offered for early restoration of civil government under unionist auspices. The pro-Confederate regime in Tennessee was brief; it extended only from

May 7, 1861 (legislative ratification of the military league with the Confederacy) to March 3, 1862, when Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson military governor of the state, a period of ten months.

Johnson’s attitude had been demonstrated by “violent opposition to slavery and secession” and by retention of his seat in the United States Senate. His unionism was unassailable, but he could only perform the functions of civil government on an emergency basis and Lincoln’s hopes for instituting a more permanent and regular regime were repeatedly deferred. There was heavy fighting in 1862 and 1863. Guerrilla warfare, raids by Forrest, agitation among discordant pro-Union elements, puzzlement as to what was “regular” by the old code of the state (nothing could be strictly regular in those war times), lack of popular interest when elections were held, complications as to soldier voting and military influence, divided leadership as between Nashville and Washington—these were among the factors that caused continual delay.

Not until February, 1865, was an election held in Tennessee which had importance in terms of popular voting for fundamental state reorganization. After that there loomed, as always, the serious obstacle of congressional opposition. Tennessee was not to be admitted to the Union until 1866. Yet as early as September 11, 1863, Lincoln had written to Governor Johnson: “All Tennessee is now clear of armed insurrectionists.” Insisting that “Not a moment should be lost” in “reinaugurating a loyal State government,” the President insisted, as in Louisiana, that prudent steps be taken without delay. Discretion was left with Johnson and “co-operating friends” as to ways and means, with the presidential injunction that the reinauguration should not be allowed to slip into the hands of enemies of the Union, “driving its friends . . . into political exile.” “It must not be so,” wrote Lincoln. “You must have it otherwise.”

In September, 1863, Andrew Johnson said to his people: “Here lies your State; a sick man in his bed, emaciated and exhausted . . . unable to walk alone. The physician comes. Don’t quarrel about antecedents, but administer to his wants . . . as quickly as possible. . . . This is no . . . metaphysical question. It is a plain, common sense matter, and there is nothing in the way but obstinacy.” Johnson’s simile of the sick man and his suggestion as to the ineptness of those administering to him could have covered a great deal more territory than Tennessee.

II Events of 1863 and early 1864 in Arkansas proceeded with little difficulty so far as that commonwealth itself was concerned. It was a sparsely settled state, with 435,000 inhabitants in 1860, of whom 111,115 were slaves. Illinois, of comparable area, had nearly four times the population. It was chiefly in the southeastern part, in the plantation area near the Mississippi River, that slaveholding was concentrated. Throughout most of the state there were few slaves, in the northern portion hardly any. People of the Ozark mountain region had little in common

with the few cotton-growing magnates. To the vast majority of the people the abolition of slavery would produce no serious reordering of their lives and economy.

The state had avoided secession until swept away by the post-Sumter excitement; when secession was adopted it was done reluctantly. Even after secession, considerable Union sentiment remained. According to a contemporary account, pertaining to the situation in 1863, “Citizens of distinction came forward to advocate the Union cause; among others, Brig.-Gen. E. W. Gantt, of the Confederate army, once held as a prisoner of war.” The shift of General Gantt from Confederate to Union allegiance was, as he said, part of a popular movement; Union sentiment, he noted, was “manifesting itself on all sides and by every indication.” For many who were of like mind with Gantt the open declaration of loyalty to the Federal government, especially after the Confederate surrender of Vicksburg, came naturally. It was like snapping out of an abnormal situation.

Military events provided a considerable impulse toward Union reorganization, especially the Union victories at Vicksburg and Port Hudson, and the Helena-Little Rock expedition of General Frederick Steele, U. S. A., against Sterling Price, C. S. A., which resulted in Confederate evacuation of Little Rock on September 10, 1863. With this Confederate reverse a large part of the state was brought under Union control.

Lincoln kept in touch with Arkansas affairs, notifying General Steele that he, as in the case of Banks in Louisiana, was “master” of the reorganization process. “Some single mind,” wrote the President, “must be master, else there will be no agreement in anything.” He had ample reason to realize the truth of this statement.

The pattern of the Arkansas movement reveals much as to Lincoln’s plan in practical operation. Sentiment developed in meetings, with Union resolutions, in large parts of the state. Delegates were chosen in such meetings (by no more and no less authority than is usual in such popular movements under the stress of abnormal conditions) for a “convention” designed to make a new regime constitutional and legal. Lincoln encouraged the holding of the convention, welcoming it as a fulfillment of his plan as announced in December, 1863. On January 20, 1864, he indicated that the reorganization emanated from citizens of Arkansas petitioning for an election, and directed Steele to “order an election immediately” for March 28, 1864. When, on counting the votes for a Union-minded governor and for changes in the state constitution, the number should reach or exceed 5,406 (that being ten per cent of the Arkansas vote of 1860), Lincoln directed that the governor thus chosen should be declared qualified and that he should assume his duties under the modified state constitution. (As a minor detail, when it was found that the Union convention in Arkansas was planning the election for March 14, not March 28, the President quickly acquiesced in the convention plan.)

In the President’s mind a milestone had been reached in Arkansas affairs with

that election of March 14. By an overwhelming majority (12,179 to 226) the voters, having qualified by taking the Federal oath of allegiance, approved those changes in the state constitution which abolished slavery, declared secession void, and repudiated the Confederate debt. Isaac Murphy, already installed as provisional governor by the convention, was now elected governor by “more than double what the President had required.” On April 11 the new state government under the modified constitution was inaugurated at Little Rock. The reconstructed legislature chose senators (William M. Fishbach and Elisha Baxter); three members of Congress had already been chosen in the March election.

Obstruction in House and Senate prevented the admission of these representatives and senators, and for long years Arkansas remained outside the pale so far as Congress was concerned. Lincoln’s view, however, both as to practical matters and as to his own function in promoting them, was shown in his executive measures to get these important steps taken, and in his advice to Steele (June 29, 1864) that, despite congressional refusal to give these solons their seats at Washington, the new state government should have “the same support and protection that you would [have given] if the members had been admitted, because in no event . . . can this do any harm, while it will be the best you can do toward suppressing the rebellion.”

III A different type of situation presented itself in Florida, where the reconstruction effort was of a minor sort. Military accomplishment, so evident in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas, was lacking in this detached area, which was off the main line of strategy and unpromising as a field in which to commit any considerable body of troops. Aside from holding a few coastal points and maintaining the blockade, the United States paid little attention to the region of the St. John’s, the St. Mary’s, and the Suwannee. The only sizable engagement in the state during the war was the ill-starred “battle of Olustee,” in the northeast corner, a short distance inward from Jacksonville, where a minor Union force under General Truman Seymour, U. S. A., was defeated by somewhat superior numbers, with advantage of defensive position, under General Joseph Finegan, C. S. A. This engagement, February 20, 1864, was the futile anticlimax of an army-navy expedition of Seymour, a subordinate of General Quincy A. Gillmore who was in command of the “Department of the South” with headquarters at Hilton Head, S. C.

Under these circumstances, though Union sentiment was held to be widespread in the state, the small-scale efforts to restore Florida were subject to the taunt that their motive was to give a plausible basis for sending pro-Lincoln delegates to the coming Republican convention; even the Seymour expedition was derided as a feature of the political campaign of 1864.

From Lincoln’s standpoint the approach to reconstruction in Florida was like that in other Southern areas. On January 13, 1864, he wrote Gillmore advising that the general was to be “master” if

differences should arise; in this letter the President urged that restoration be pushed “in the most speedy way possible,” and that it be done within the range of the December proclamation. To handle some of the details John Hay was sent to Florida “with some blank-books [for recording oaths] and other blanks, to aid in the reconstruction.” This trip of Hay’s (February-March 1864) was not a brilliant success and the sum-total of the Florida gesture for reconstruction was far from impressive. Florida’s “delegates,” chosen by a few in Jacksonville, did turn up at the Republican convention in June, 1864, but not until after the war did the commonwealth proceed to the making of a new state constitution within the range of the Union; readmission to the Union—i. e., inauguration of carpetbag government—occurred in 1868; restoration of home rule—the throwing off of Radical Republican control—was deferred to 1877.

Small though it was, there was more in the Union effort in Florida than at first met the eye. One could treat the Seymour, or Gillmore-Seymour, expedition of 1864 as a sorry military enterprise, or as a disappointing phase of Lincoln’s reconstruction plan, but in a realistic study one needs to enlarge the scope of inquiry. The episode must also be viewed in its relation to such subjects as the use of Negro troops (in which there was creditable performance), maneuvers in the pro-Chase sense, the opening of trade, and what has been called “carpetbag imperialism.” In a detailed study George Winston Smith has pointed out that grandiose schemes or experiments were conjured up in connection with the Florida effort. There was, for example, the “extravagant plan” of Eli Thayer of Kansas emigrant fame—a well-intentioned plan to set up “soldier-colonists” and create model communities on the most approved New England pattern. The plan reached “only the blueprint stage,” but it reveals much as to Yankee enterprise in the deep South. There was also injected into the wartime Florida scene the “machinations” of Lyman K. Stickney, “the most notorious of the early Florida carpetbaggers,” who operated under Secretary Chase in the enforcement of a congressional act for collecting the Federal direct tax in the South. This law, writes Smith, was a “move to confiscate the real property of southern landholders” and was so administered as to become “an instrument of predatory corruption in Florida.”

These factors need to be borne in mind in judging Lincoln’s approach to reconstruction. It was a complicated problem of many facets, with idealistic motives combined with profit-seeking greed. Lincoln tried to keep restoration on the main track and keep it unmarred, but it was part of the history of the time—the prelude to the “Gilded Age”—that debased and uninspiring maneuvers would creep in. Florida was only an example. When one remembers such influences, he can realize with fuller force the significance of Lincoln’s rejection of the whole drive and tendency toward carpetbaggism.

IV In Lincoln’s planning for a restored Union he kept his eye constantly on a highly

important factor, that of unionism in the South. Of course it could have been said by critics that Lincoln was not bothering with the opposition, that he was requiring an oath of Union allegiance as a prerequisite for the right to vote on any state reorganization, and that he was thus stacking the cards in his favor, working only with friends of the Union. This seemed the more striking because of his willingness to depend on a Union-minded minimum of ten per cent (of 1860 voters) for the initial steps of reconstruction.

Yet on closer study it will be seen that success for any reunion movement was dependent upon popular support in the state. Always at some point there had to be an election, a popular choice of a constitutional convention to remake the state constitution, and a vote for state officials and members of Congress. People who voted in these initial elections had to take the Union oath; but no one was to be coerced into taking it, and if the number of oath-takers was too insignificant, the plan would not get very far. Lincoln was starting with a loyal minority, but the quality and extent of that minority was never unimportant. Furthermore, the President was planning for peace, for the long years ahead after the war ended.

At all times the President felt assured that his plan would work for the whole South. He could hardly have proceeded with such confidence unless he genuinely believed that unionists in the South were, for the long run and for normal times, in the majority. In fact the validity of Lincoln’s basic political philosophy depended upon self rule by the people. To impose a government upon an unwilling state—even a benevolent government—would have been contrary to this fundamental philosophy. There was a risk involved in Lincoln’s scheme but it was a calculated risk. When there would come the hazard of an election, that would not merely mean that people should vote because of having sworn allegiance. It meant that such allegiance was expected to prove justified in the type of government set up, the working out of labor adjustment, the choice of well disposed officials, the installing of honest government, and the like.

If these things went wrong even after the initial steps had been taken in compliance with the President’s plan, the broad policy would fail. Lincoln’s feeling of assurance that it would not fail must have been based on more than wishful thinking. It is therefore of importance to look into the matter and find the basis for this assurance—in other words, to discover some of the evidences of unionism in the South which were known to the President. To give the whole body of such evidence is obviously impracticable, but a few items may be mentioned with the understanding that they were typical of a large and impressive total.

There was the element of war-weariness in the South; people were sick and tired of the continued slaughter.

A captured Union general, the famous Neal Dow, wrote to Lincoln from Libby Prison, Richmond, on November 12, 1863: “... I have seen much of Rebeldom, behind the curtain, and have talked with a great many soldiers, conscripts, deserters, officers, and citizens. The result of all is, to my mind, that . . . the masses are heartily . . . anxious for its [the war’s] close on any terms. . . .” He went on to mention numerous Confederate desertions, soldier infirmities, general debility, the worthlessness of conscripts, depreciation of the currency, flour at $125 a barrel, and “everything in the provision line . . . [bearing] a corresponding price.”

In Virginia the attitude of intelligent and patriotic unionists was typified by Alexander H. H. Stuart. Though not active against secession during the war, he had been fundamentally opposed to it as inexpedient. Stuart defined his wartime attitudes as follows:

“During the war, I abstained from all participation in public affairs, except on two or three occasions when I was called to address public meetings to urge contributions for the relief of the suffering soldiers and the prisoners going to as well as returning from the North.

“My age relieved me from the obligation to render military service, and all the assistance I gave to the Confederate cause was by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and nursing the sick Confederate soldiers, and making myself and urging others to make liberal donations for their relief.”

Another prominent Virginia unionist was the distinguished lawyer John Minor Botts. He had strongly opposed Southern Democratic disunionists, and, though disapproving also of abolitionists, had given support to the efforts of John Quincy Adams in the matter of antislavery petitions presented to Congress. When Lincoln was a Whig member of Congress from Illinois, Botts was a Whig member from Virginia (1847-49); indeed many of his views were similar to Lincoln’s. Both in 1850 and in 1860 he was an earnest opponent of secession, his opposition to Jefferson Davis and to Governor Henry Wise of Virginia being especially marked. He greatly regretted the secession of his state in 1860, which he had tried to prevent. During the war he was so far out of sympathy with the Confederate government that he was arrested and confined for some months in jail. For the most part, however, he spent the war years in retirement. His later career showed the steadfastness of his Union loyalty.

The fact that certain Southern areas had never left the Union was, of course, significant. That was true of Kentucky. It was remarked that the mountainous districts of that border state were “with very few exceptions . . . thoroughly union.” The same observer noted derisively that in the central part of the state “most of the large slave holders, . . . the gamblers ... all the decayed chivalry ... all the fast & fashionable ones & nearly all the original Breckinridge Democrats are bitter to secessionists.”

V Unionist voices

were audible throughout the unhappy South. A clear sign of the times in Louisiana was the editorial of the True Delta of New Orleans (February 5, 1864) praising Lincoln, comparing him to Washington and Jackson, and favoring his re-election. In Mississippi a local judge wrote: “I have first, last and all the time , been a Union man.” Secession, he reported, had been put over without the people understanding what was involved. In another report from Mississippi it was indicated that there were “thousands . . . who desire most ardently the restoration of the United States.”

In North Carolina peace movements were rife and it was reported early in 1864 that troops from the Old North State were deserting rapidly and extensively from the Confederate service. In the previous year a group of North Carolina citizens had presented a petition to the President, asking him to “order an election day for this district for the purpose of electing a representative for the next Congress.” These petitioners represented themselves as “loyal to the Constitution of our country anxious that it should be perpetuated.”

As to Alabama it was predicted that if the question of returning to the Union were submitted to a vote, the people would “vote aye, five to one .” The President was given the following assurance: “Could you know how deep and universal is the returning love for the union among the people of Ala & Geo you would discharge your great responsibilities with a hymn of joy in your heart.”

These evidences, and more of the same, were available to Lincoln. Since his day further material has come to light tending to reveal the extent of Union sentiment in seceded states. Naturally, men and women of Union sympathies in the South found existing conditions difficult for any expression of loyalty in active, organized form. Yet their restricted attitude was significant as they maintained a kind of passive resistance, avoided voluntary measures against the government at Washington, opposed the Confederate draft, carried provisions and medicines to Union soldiers, contributed money for the welfare of blue-coats, attended boys in hospitals, and performed other friendly acts for Federal troops. Such acts incurred persecution, and the Southern unionist moved often in an atmosphere of scorn and hostility not unaccompanied by threats and acts of personal violence. Of course, in various respects he was compelled to act against his will when it was a matter of serving as conscript, subscribing to a Confederate loan, contributing cotton, paying taxes, or performing labor. Since Southern wartime history has been largely remembered and recorded in Confederate terms, these details are still somewhat obscure; at least their full force is not generally recognized.

No history of Lincoln, however, can ignore them. His reports from the South were a vital element in policy making. When he made his broad appeal in December, 1863, offering pardon, prescribing his simple oath, and opening the way for new

state governments by genuine Southern effort looking toward peace with freedom and union, he had reason to know, at least in large part, the kind of support and fulfillment upon which he could count. His sense of his own function as leader was strengthened by his realization that Southern unionism did not signify willingness to accept the program and regime of congressional Radicals. On the contrary, such union-mindedness was oriented in Lincolnian terms. In taking on the responsibility of launching and promoting reconstruction, Lincoln saw an opportunity which needed to be seized while its most fruitful results were yet possible.

Congress: Means and Ends

At the end of June, 1864, the final resignation of Treasury Secretary Chase raised new questions about government finance and complicated the relations between Congress and President. His resignation climaxed the long-raging feud in Congress between his adherents and those of Seward, Welles, and the Blairs.

After Frank Blair’s repeated philippics in the House against the Treasury Secretary, the friends of Chase twice demanded that Lincoln dismiss Montgomery Blair as Postmaster General in order to repudiate his brother. But Lincoln not only declined to get rid of Montgomery; he also showed favor to Frank by telegraphing Grant, late in April, to restore him to his position as Major General. Infuriated, Chase thought of resigning, going home to Ohio, and rallying the people to support him against Lincoln and the Blairs. The Governor of Ohio, John Brough, talked him into withholding his resignation—for the good of the country.

Though Chase was quieted for the moment, his adherents in both houses of Congress were not. Some of the Representatives muttered about impeaching the President, and the Senate approved a resolution, introduced by Garrett Davis of Kentucky, which rebuked Lincoln along with Stanton for violating the Constitution by permitting Blair to serve as a military officer while a member of Congress. Unable to get at the Cabinet representative of the hated Blair family, the Radicals became the more determined to make an example of his more vulnerable brother. Stevens introduced and the House passed a resolution calling on the Executive to provide information about Frank Blair’s dual character, military and congressional. Responding fully and yet somewhat defiantly, Lincoln gave Congress a complete report, including a copy of a letter he had written the previous December advising that Blair give up his military commission temporarily, aid in organizing the House of Representatives, and then remain in Congress if elected Speaker. Their fury redoubled by this revelation, the Radicals took occasion at the Baltimore convention to strike at the Blairs by seating the anti-Blair delegation from Missouri and by inserting in the platform the sixth resolution, which called for a reorganization of the Cabinet in the interests of harmony. In Congress they succeeded in unseating Blair before the end of the session.

Blair’s ouster did not entirely appease Chase and his friends, for Chase was already encountering the Blair charges of corruption and mismanagement from another quarter, and these

charges became involved in and gave added bitterness to a deadly patronage fight. Thurlow Weed, replying in his Albany Evening Journal to attacks on Seward in the pro-Chase New York Evening Post , elaborated on the alleged corruption of Chase’s Treasury appointees in New York. In the midst of this journalistic bickering the Assistant Treasurer in New York, John J. Cisco, decided to leave his job. Chase was ready to name as Cisco’s successor the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Munsell B. Field. But Weed objected to Field’s appointment.

Lincoln faced a dilemma. If he appointed Field he would antagonize not only Weed and Seward but also the New York Senators, one of whom was Edwin D. Morgan, chairman of the Republican National Committee. The rule of Senatorial courtesy as well as relations with the New York machine was at stake. Lincoln regularly consulted with Republicans in the Senate before making major appointments in their respective states. After consulting with Senator Morgan, who protested against Field and suggested three others as possibilities for a compromise appointment, Lincoln submitted the three names to Chase and requested him to approve one of them or suggest someone else not obnoxious to the Senators. Chase refused to consider anyone except Field for Cisco’s job but, rather than force the issue, he persuaded Cisco to withdraw his resignation for the time being. Lincoln meanwhile was putting pressure on Chase by hinting that, if Field was to be appointed, another Chase man, Hiram Barney, might have to be removed from the position of Collector of the Port of New York.

Chase replied in a two-page letter with a couple of enclosures which Lincoln received on the evening of June 29. Hastily scanning the first page, Lincoln noticed the words: “The withdrawal of Mr. Cisco’s resignation, which I enclose, relieves the present difficulty. . . .” This was most welcome news, and happy that the troublesome matter was thus disposed of, Lincoln put the papers in his pocket without finishing the letter. Hours later, sitting down to pen a congratulatory note to the Secretary, he looked at the letter and the enclosures again. He now discovered that, while Cisco was taking back his resignation, Chase was putting forth his own!

That evening Lincoln happened to see Governor Brough, visiting in Washington, and invited him into the White House to discuss Chase’s resignation. Brough thought he could get the Ohio congressmen together and, with them, prevail upon Chase to retract it. “But,” protested Lincoln, as Brough quoted him in a memorandum he dictated two weeks afterward, “this is the third time he has thrown this at me, and I do not think I am called on to continue to beg him to take it back, especially when the country would not go to destruction in consequence.” The next day Lincoln penned a note to Chase—“you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relations which it seems can

not be overcome”—accepting the resignation.

In naming Chase’s successor Lincoln at first seemed to be most concerned about appeasing the Ohio Republican organization rather than Congress or Wall Street. He promptly thought of David Tod, Brough’s predecessor as Ohio Governor. The Senate Finance Committee, however, was not willing. Headed by William Pitt Fessenden, the committeemen called on the President to tell him Tod had too little experience and was too little known. Lincoln assured them of his own confidence in Tod, acknowledged their duty and responsibility of passing on Tod’s fitness, and declared that he could not “in justice to himself or Tod” withdraw the nomination.

In another talk with Governor Brough the President emphatically repeated his refusal to withdraw it. “The Governor,” according to Brough’s own account, “advised him to request the Senate Committee to delay their report until the next morning, as he was satisfied Tod w d decline the appointment, and in that way the President, the Senate, Tod and the country would be relieved from embarrassment.” Lincoln wanted to know Brough’s reasons for thinking Tod would decline. Brough gave his reasons: “The state of his [Tod’s] health, and the fact that in the nomination he got all the honor without the hard work; and that Tod was a man of good common sense and would not willingly place himself in a position which he was not capable of filling.” Lincoln “accepted this advice, and apparently with great pleasure.”

Tod did decline, but Lincoln continued to talk of appointing an Ohioan, either former Governor Dennison or Governor Brough himself. Brough, again according to his own story, argued against any such appointment and recommended Senator Fessenden instead.

The next morning, July 1, Lincoln sent Hay to the Senate with Fessenden’s nomination. It was “instantly confirmed, the executive session not lasting more than a minute,” as Hay recorded. At this very moment, unaware of his appointment, Fessenden was in the White House in conversation with the President. “I could not help being amused,” Lincoln told Hay afterwards, “by seeing him sitting there so unconscious and you on your way to the Capitol.”

For a while some of Lincoln’s friends as well as Chase’s partisans feared that the loss of Chase might prove disastrous to the Administration and to the Union cause. At a time of “military unsuccess, financial weakness,” and “Congressional hesitation on question of conscription,” Representative Washburne said, Lincoln’s acceptance of the resignation would be “ruinous.” The financiers in Wall Street, however, did not consider Chase an indispensable man. Though distressed by Tod’s nomination, they were reassured by Fessenden’s appointment and by the coincident repeal of the gold bill.

The political consequences of the Cabinet change were more dangerous for the Administration than the financial consequences. So far as Lincoln’s re-election prospects were concerned, Abram Wakeman, the New York Postmaster, believed that Chase’s departure would be a help rather than a hindrance, for “henceforward the fifty thousand Treasury agents would be friends of the President

instead of enemies.” But a newspaper correspondent warned that, if the people generally should get the impression that Chase had been “wrongly treated,” then Lincoln, though reelected, might “find himself in a minority of Congress ” during his second term.

Certainly the affair did bode ill for Lincoln’s relations with Congress, immediately as well as remotely. Though Fessenden was a Radical of sorts and “the Senate’s man,” the Radicals in Congress did not consider him a sufficient offset to such Cabinet Conservatives as Montgomery Blair. With Chase out, the Radicals were to increase their clamor for Blair’s removal. Already one of the most extreme among them in the House, Blair’s Maryland rival Henry Winter Davis, was preparing in collaboration with Benjamin F. Wade in the Senate an explosive challenge to the President’s authority over the reconstruction of the Southern states.

II While the President was beginning the reestablishment of Southern state governments with his “ten per cent plan,” many of his fellow partisans in Congress were denouncing it, frustrating its purposes, and preparing an alternative of their own. “We may conquer rebels and hold them in subjection,” Stevens told the House in reply to Lincoln’s message of December, 1863, but it was a “mere mockery” of democratic principles to say that a “tithe” of the inhabitants of a conquered state could carry on government because they were “more holy or more loyal than the others.” Stevens refused to hear of giving seats in Congress to representatives seeking admission from states reorganized under the presidential plan.

Meanwhile Henry Winter Davis had induced the House to refer the reconstruction passages of the President’s message to a special committee, of which he became chairman. From the committee he reported a bill (February 15, 1864) to guarantee a “republican form of government” to certain states whose governments had been “usurped or overthrown.” A preamble to the bill implied that these states were no longer in the Union: they were entitled neither to be represented in Congress nor to take any part in the national government. Some of the bill’s provisions coincided with features of the President’s plan, but others ran counter to it.

As in his program, slavery was to be prohibited, the post-secession public debts disavowed, and representation in Congress permitted only with congressional assent. A majority of the white male citizens, however, and not a mere ten per cent of the 1860 voters, was to start the remaking of a state government—a majority taking an oath to support the Constitution of the United States. Not all members of this majority were to be allowed actually to participate in the creation of a new state constitution: only those who could swear that they had never voluntarily borne arms against the United States, nor given aid to persons in armed hostility thereto, nor supported any hostile “pretended government.” Nor was any former officeholder under a “usurping power” to vote or hold office in the recreated state.