Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [298]
Francis Blair, Sr., who had already assured his slaves that they could “go when they wished,” proudly affirmed that “all but one declined the privilege,” electing to stay on as servants at Silver Springs, where they lived together in their own “quarters” that resembled those on Southern plantations. One servant, Henry, declared he “was used to quality all his days” and wanted to remain with the Blairs for the rest of his life. Nanny, another servant, agreed. She was “well off,” had no thought of moving on, but was “delighted that her children are free.”
The situation became more complex when the radical bloc in Congress began to address slavery in the seceded Southern states where it already existed and was protected by the Constitution. In July, despite the vehement protests of Democrats and conservative Republicans, the radical majority passed a new confiscation bill. Broader than the bill passed the previous year, which had limited the federal government to confiscating and freeing only those fugitive slaves employed by rebels in the field, the new act emancipated all slaves of persons engaged in rebellion, regardless of involvement in military affairs. The bill was ill considered, providing no workable means of enforcement and no procedure to determine whether the owner of a slave crossing Union lines was actually engaged in insurrection. “It was,” the historian Mark Neely writes, “a dead letter from the start.” But it stirred the hearts of all those, like Charles Sumner, who believed that slavery was a “disturbing influence which, so long as it exists, will keep this land a volcano, ever ready to break anew.”
It was rumored in Washington that Lincoln would veto the controversial bill. Indeed, Browning carried a copy of it to the White House as soon as it passed, pleading with Lincoln to veto it. If approved, he warned, “our friends” in the border states “could no longer sustain themselves there.” The bill would “form the basis upon which the democratic party would again rally, and reorganize an opposition to the administration.” Lincoln’s decision, Browning insisted, would “determine whether he was to control the abolitionists and radicals, or whether they were to control him.” The key moment had arrived when “the tide in his affairs had come and he ought to take it at its flood.”
Chase presented the diametrically opposed prediction, which maintained that if Lincoln vetoed the bill, it “will be an end of him.” The Republican majority in Congress would break ranks with the administration, and Lincoln would be openly castigated on the floor. Worried that he, too, might be tainted by a presidential veto, Chase told his friends to spread word that he had not been consulted, “nor so far as he knew [had] a single member of his cabinet” been involved. While he would willingly answer for his actions as treasury secretary, Chase refused to take the blame “for other people’s blunders or errors of policy.”
Rumors that Lincoln would veto the bill proved incorrect. The next morning, Browning found the president working in his library. He “looked weary, care-worn and troubled,” Browning noted, “and there was a cadence of deep sadness in his voice.” The president had made his decision, which he knew would distress his friend. Still, before signing the bill that would become known as the Second Confiscation Act, Lincoln listed his objections in writing and obtained a revised bill that made it more likely to pass constitutional muster.
As was customary on the last day of the session, the president traveled to the Capitol, stationing himself in the vice president’s office, where he signed the spate of bills rushed through in the final days of the term. It had been an extraordinarily productive session. Relieved of Southern opposition, the Republican majority was able to pass three historic bills that had been stalled for years: the Homestead Act, which promised 160 acres of free public land largely in the