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

Lincoln, after all, had won the Republican nomination in 1860 precisely on the grounds that he was more of a moderate than Seward or Chase and could win more votes, while his slowness in moving toward emancipation has been interpreted as proof of Lincoln’s distaste for Radicals. Deep in Lincoln’s temperament was a resistance to radical schemes of social change. “In declaring that they would ‘do their duty and leave the consequences to God,’” the abolitionists “merely gave an excuse for taking a course that they were not able to maintain by a fair and full argument. To make this declaration did not show what their duty was.” Sometimes, Lincoln said to his attorney general, the Missourian Edward Bates, these Radical Republicans were “almost fiendish” in their intensity to bully him into agreement with their agenda. “Stevens, Sumner and Wilson, simply haunt me,” Lincoln complained to Missouri senator John B. Henderson. “Wherever I go and whatever way I turn, they are on my trail.”76

But Lincoln shared more ground with Radical thinking on the key issues of abolition and black civil equality than he often admitted, and it is significant that the Radicals also sought and got policy statements from Lincoln for use in directing their legislative campaigns, while he never gave any such to Republican moderates. William Lloyd Garrison broke ranks with Wendell Phillips and other abolitionists and openly supported Lincoln’s reelection. “There is no mistake about it in regard to Mr. Lincoln’s desire to do all that he can see it right and possible for him to do to uproot slavery,” Garrison assured his wife after meeting with Lincoln in the White House in the summer of 1864. Sumner remained a close family friend of the Lincolns all through the war; Lincoln’s strongest political ally in the House of Representatives was Owen Lovejoy, brother of the abolitionist martyr Elijah Lovejoy and one of the most Radical Republicans in Congress. Lovejoy had stood loyally behind Lincoln for being “at heart as strong an anti-slavery man as any of them,” reminding his fellow radicals that Lincoln had to be the president of the whole Union, not just the Radicals’ part of it, and thus was “compelled to feel his way.” When Lovejoy died in 1864 Lincoln paid tribute to him as “my most generous friend” in Congress, and he told Shelby Cullom “that he was one of the best men in Congress.” As much as the Radicals were “bitterly hostile” to him “personally,” and “utterly lawless—the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with,” Lincoln also admitted that “after all their faces are set Zion-wards.” As he told John B. Henderson, “Sumner and Wade and Chandler are right about [abolition]. … We can’t get through this terrible war with slavery existing.” 77

If Lincoln resisted the Radicals, it was not so much because of outright disagreements over ideology, but because he was determined to keep the hands of Congress off his presidential prerogatives (especially as commander in chief) and to prevent the long-term outcomes of the war from backfiring, either through further bankrupting the county through endless conflict or so wrecking the Southern economy that the freed slaves would have nothing to be free for afterward. If the Radicals were impatient with Lincoln, it was not so much because of a difference of principles, but on differences of timing and political tactics, especially where these concerned the military conduct of the war, abolition, and Lincoln’s proposals for reconstructing the Union—although that provided more than enough room for antagonism and headaches.

As early as December 1861 the Radicals tried to deal themselves a piece of Lincoln’s war powers by creating a seven-member House-Senate committee, known as the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, with Wade and Chandler as the unofficial handlers. “I hold it to be our bounden duty… to keep an anxious, watchful eye over all the executive agents who are carrying on the war at the direction of the people, whom we represent and whom we are bound to protect in relation to this matter,” declared William Pitt Fessenden. Although it was never actually stated in so many words, the joint committee was understood as the Radicals’ lever for pressuring Lincoln and the Union military into waging a more and more Radical version of the war. In February 1862, the committee moved first against Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, a McClellanite general who had botched a small-scale military operation at Ball’s Bluff on the Potomac. It was clear that Stone was a surrogate for McClellan, whom the Radicals had already come to hate as a Democrat and halfhearted. As an object lesson, the committee had Stone arrested and imprisoned for six months without so much as a chance to hear the charges—whatever they were—against him. Nothing bound the committee to observe the customary legal safeguards for those it examined, and the hapless generals and politicians who were haled before the committee were unable to respond to their accusers, or even (like Stone) to see a copy of the charges that had led to their investigation in the first place. Over the course of the war, the joint committee held 272 meetings and issued eight fat volumes of proceedings, including condemnations of the massacre at Sand Creek and the slaughter of the black soldiers at Fort Pillow. 78

Lincoln did not entirely welcome the meddling of the joint committee, and even though Ben Wade offered Lincoln the use of the committee’s services to call the House or the Senate into closed-door sessions on war policy, Lincoln ignored what he rightly saw as an attempt to manipulate his prerogatives as president. But much as Lincoln was careful to guard his own constitutional powers from overeager interference by the joint committee, it is significant that Lincoln never actually attacked the committee, and he made no attempt to intervene on behalf of Stone or any of the other hapless generals the committee summoned for questioning. After all, the simple threat of the committee’s existence was