Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [382]
Agreeing that no rebellious state could be reconstructed without emancipation, Lincoln still refused to tolerate the radicals’ desire to punish the South. He offered full pardons to all those who took the oath, excepting those who had served at high levels in the Confederate government or the army. When the number of loyal men taking the oath reached 10 percent of the votes cast in the 1860 election, they could “re-establish a State government” recognized by the United States. The names and boundaries of the states would remain as they were.
Conservatives hailed the 10 percent plan, believing it effectively destroyed Sumner’s scheme to consider the defeated states as territories that Congress could rename and reorganize as it wished. Nevertheless, Sumner told a fellow radical that Lincoln’s “theory is identical with ours,” for he, too, required Reconstruction before the “subverted” rebel states could rejoin the Union, “although he adopts a different nomenclature.”
In presenting his 10 percent plan, Lincoln assured members of Congress that it was not fixed in stone. He would listen to their ideas as the process evolved. He hoped simply to give the Southern states “a rallying point,” bringing them “to act sooner than they otherwise would.” He recognized that it would devastate Confederate morale to see Southern citizens declare their fealty to the Union and their support for emancipation.
Though the happy accord would not last long, Lincoln had succeeded for the moment in uniting the Republican Party. When the Blairs, Sumner, and the Missouri radicals “are alike agreed to accept” the president’s message, Brooks observed, “we may well conclude that the political millennium has well-nigh come, or that the author of the message is one of the most sagacious men of modern times.” The president, announced Congressman Francis Kellogg of Michigan, “is the great man of the century. There is none like him in the world. He sees more widely and more clearly than anybody.”
Lincoln’s old friend Norman Judd called on the president the evening of the annual address. He speculated that, given the radical tone of the document, Blair and Bates “must walk the plank.” On the contrary, Lincoln assured him, both “acquiesced in it without objection. The only member of the Cabinet who objected to it was Mr. Chase.”
Chase had obstinately demanded a requirement for states to prove their “sincerity” by changing their constitutions to perpetuate emancipation. This legitimate objection had the felicitous effect of allowing Chase to stay in front of Lincoln on Reconstruction in order to cement his standing in radical circles. While Republicans of all stripes praised the message, Chase expressed disappointment. Writing to the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, he said he had tried but failed to get Lincoln to make it “more positive and less qualified…. But I suppose I must use Touchstone’s philosophy & be thankful for skim milk when cream is not to be had.”
LINCOLN APPROACHED the Christmas season in high spirits. As he said in his annual message, he detected a more hopeful mood in the country after the “dark and doubtful days” following the Emancipation Proclamation. The fall elections had been “highly encouraging”; the rebels had been defeated in a series of recent battles; and the opening round in the debate over Reconstruction had gone surprisingly well.
Early in December, Lincoln translated his rhetoric about forgiveness and reconciliation into action when he invited his sister-in-law, Emilie Helm, to stay at the White House. Emilie’s husband, Ben, had disappointed Lincoln in the early days of the war by taking a commission in the Confederate Army instead of Lincoln’s offer of the Union Army paymaster’s position. Helm was fatally wounded in Tennessee at the Battle of Chickamauga, where he commanded the First Kentucky Brigade. Judge Davis saw Lincoln shortly after he received the news of Helm’s death. “I never saw Mr. Lincoln more