Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [452]
Still, Lincoln did not relinquish hope that he might somehow bring the war to an honorable end before tens of thousands more young men had to die. Following his Hampton Roads suggestion of compensated emancipation, he drafted a proposal that Congress empower him “to pay four hundred millions of dollars” to the Southern states, distributed according to “their respective slave populations.” The first half would be paid if “all resistance to the national authority” came to an end by April 1; the second half would be allocated if the Thirteenth Amendment were ratified by July 1. At that point, with the armed rebellion at an end, the Union restored, and slavery eradicated, “all political offences will be pardoned” and “all property, except slaves, liable to confiscation or forfeiture, will be released.” Furthermore, “liberality will be recommended to congress upon all points not lying within executive control.”
The proposition met with unanimous disapproval from the cabinet, all of whom were present except Seward. “The earnest desire of the President to conciliate and effect peace was manifest,” Welles recorded, “but there may be such a thing as so overdoing as to cause a distrust or adverse feeling.” Usher believed that the radicals in Congress “would make it the occasion of a violent assault on the President.” Stanton had long maintained that it was unnecessary and wasteful to talk about compensation for slaves already freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Fessenden declared “that the only way to effectually end the war was by force of arms, and that until the war was thus ended no proposition to pay money would come from us.”
Lincoln pointed out that the sum he proposed was simply the cost of continuing the war for another one or two hundred days, “to say nothing of the lives lost and property destroyed.” Still, the cabinet was adamant. “You are all against me,” Lincoln said, his voice filled with sadness. “His heart was so fully enlisted in behalf of such a plan that he would have followed it if only a single member of his Cabinet had supported him,” Usher thought. Had Seward been there, Usher mused, “he would probably have approved the measure.” Without a trace of support among his colleagues at the table, Lincoln felt compelled to forsake his proposition, which, in any event, as Jefferson Davis had made clear, was unacceptable to the Confederacy. So the war would continue until the South capitulated.
MEANWHILE, THE WAR FRONT continued to generate good news for the Union. After capturing Savannah, Sherman had headed north to Columbia, reaching the state capital of South Carolina on February 17. Columbia’s fall led to the evacuation of Charleston. Stanton ordered “a national salute” fired from “every fort arsenal and army headquarters of the United States, in honor of the restoration of the flag of the Union upon Fort Sumter.” In Washington, the National Republican noted, “the flash and smoke were visible from the tops of buildings on the avenue, and the thunder of the guns was heard in all parts of the city.” That evening, Lincoln was in “cheerful” spirits as he relaxed with Seward, Welles, and General Hooker in his office. “General H. thinks it the brightest day in four years,” Welles recorded in his diary.
The following day, however, Browning found Lincoln “more depressed” than he had seen him in the four years of his presidency. His low spirits were probably caused by the pending execution of John Yates Beall, a former Confederate captain who had been tried and found guilty as a