Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

the back made party regulars blanch. Chase rushed to Lincoln to swear that he had known nothing about the Pomeroy circular, and he even offered to resign from the Cabinet. Lincoln pointedly gave Chase’s protests a chilly reception, and, knowing that it would be easier to keep a leash on Chase’s ambition inside the cabinet rather than outside, refused the resignation. The Chase boomlet had worried Lincoln a good deal, and McClure remembered that it was the only occasion when he had seen Lincoln “unbalanced … like one who had got into water far beyond his depth.” 69

Lincoln now had Chase where he wanted him: Chase’s chances for the nomination vanished into thin air, and even the Republicans in his native Ohio rejected any notion of his candidacy. “The Pomeroy Circular has helped Lincoln more than all other things together,” wrote one of John Sherman’s constituents. At the end of June Chase offered again to resign over a minor disagreement about patronage, and this time Lincoln accepted his offer. “You and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained,” Lincoln wrote coldly. He replaced him with William Pitt Fessenden, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. That December, Lincoln got rid of Chase once and for all by kicking him upstairs to become chief justice of the Supreme Court, a position that no one had any hope of using as a springboard for the presidency.70

The kind of clash Lincoln had with Chase was really little more than a cloakroom dispute, and it paled by comparison with the struggle Lincoln faced when his fellow Republicans openly declared their disagreements with him on substantial questions of war policy. The Thirty-eighth Congress, which had been formed in the painful 1862 elections (and which met for its first session on December 7, 1863), counted 102 Republican Representatives in the House and 36 Republicans in the Senate, which gave them a clear majority over against the 75 Democratic Representatives in the House and 9 Democrats in the Senate. 71Of the Republican senators, seventeen of them formed an especially critical core of radical Republican determination. They expressed themselves time and again in pressing for the swiftest and most extreme solutions to the problems of war policy, including emancipation and black civil rights.

The figurehead of the Senate Radicals was Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, and no one could match Sumner’s eloquence in pleading for an aggressive prosecution of the war, emancipation, and racial equality. While Sumner was a great talker, he had few skills as a practical politician. Far more talented among the Radicals in wielding the political knife was Benjamin Franklin Wade, crude and competent, and the author of the greatest anti-slavery bon mot in the history of the Congress. (In the debates in the 1850s over the extension of the slavery into the territories, one southern senator shed eloquent tears over the Republicans’ refusal to allow him to take his old black mammy to Kansas with him; Wade replied that he had no objection to the senator’s taking his mammy with him to Kansas, only to selling her once he got there.) Sumner and Wade were joined in radicalism by Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and the unfortunate Pomeroy of Kansas, and Wilson, Wade, Sumner, Trumbull, and Chandler all sat together as one phalanx on the right side of the aisle on the floor of the Senate.72

Most of the Radicals were old veterans of the anti-slavery struggle, and many had even longer ties to the old Whig Party; as a result, they were inclined to regard Lincoln as a political novice. “I begin to despair of ever putting down this rebellion through the instrumentality of this administration,” raged Ben Wade; Lincoln’s ideas “could only come of one, born of poor white trash, and educated in a slave state.” While Lincoln hesitated over colonization, compensated emancipation, and the recruitment of black soldiers, the Radical Republicans used the majority they achieved in the Senate after the withdrawal of the Southern senators to lead the way in expelling Democratic senators of dubious loyalty, in abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, in amending the Militia Act to open up recruitment to black soldiers, in repealing the Fugitive Slave Law, in barring the issue of charters to District of Columbia streetcar companies that practiced racial discrimination, and in equalizing pay for the USCT regiments.73 The conventional wisdom about these Radical Republicans sees them as vengeful, ambitious men, eager to use emancipation as a means of subduing the South once and for all to Northern free-labor capitalism. There may be some debate about their lust for vengeance or self-aggrandizement, but it is certainly true enough that they had embraced the protection of Northern industry through high tariffs, the opening of western public lands to homesteaders as a means of avoiding the formation of a propertyless urban proletariat, and the replacement of slavery in the South with free labor. By these means, argued Wade, the Union would “build up a free yeomanry capable of maintaining an independent republican Government forever.”74

“For nearly two generations, the slaveholding class, into whose power the Government early passed, dictated the policy of the nation,” wrote Henry Wilson. It scarcely took the war to convince them that the South was an obstacle to the triumph of Republicanism and needed a root-and-branch re-creation. The Radicals crafted the confiscation bills in 1861 and 1862 and called for the treatment of rebels as traitors whose penalty, “as established by our fathers, was death by the halter.” Their no-compromise attitude and determination to grant the Republican Party a lock on the national government frequently made them impatient with Lincoln’s administration. In 1862 they tried to unseat Seward as secretary of state, and a few obliquely suggested that even Lincoln should resign. 75

Lincoln, by contrast, has been portrayed as a moderate and far-seeing statesman, desiring only to end the war without bitterness.