The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [171]
The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the problem of Reconstruction, for it implied that the Confederate states could not resume their prewar status without acknowledging the destruction of slavery. During 1863, Lincoln repeatedly urged military governors in the South to organize loyal governments that abolished slavery, even in states all or part of which he had exempted from the proclamation. “Get emancipation into your new state government—Constitution,” he urged Andrew Johnson, Tennessee’s military governor, in September. Two months later, he insisted that any new government established in Louisiana must be committed to the end of slavery. People had to take sides, he wrote, “be for and not against…permanent freedom.”43
At the same time, however, Lincoln repeatedly suggested in 1863 that he would prefer a gradual end to slavery and a probationary period of black apprenticeship, as he had proposed in his 1849 bill for abolition in the District of Columbia. He had long feared that immediate emancipation would produce chaos. A week after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he wrote to Major General John A. McClernand, who commanded part of Grant’s army engaged in the attack on Vicksburg, that southern states were welcome to “adopt systems of apprenticeship for the colored people, conforming substantially to the most approved plans of gradual emancipation.” In July 1863, he suggested to General Stephen A. Hurlbut that “some plan, substantially being gradual emancipation, would be better for both white and black,” and urged him to press Arkansas Unionists to move in this direction. In November, on the day he departed for Gettysburg, Lincoln told a Texas Unionist that the sudden destruction of slavery would “be attended with great ruin.” He would be “glad to see” the state adopt a plan of “gradual emancipation.”44
How gradual abolition would work remained quite unclear. Would those who had been declared free on January 1, 1863, revert for a time to slavery or apprenticeship? Gradual emancipation had been carried out by northern states in the early republic. But its recent history, especially in the British Caribbean, was hardly encouraging. In Illinois, as Lincoln must have known, apprenticeship had served as a means of continuing slavery, not a pathway to freedom. Rather than carefully thought-out proposals, Lincoln’s references to gradualism and apprenticeship were efforts to make emancipation and reunion palatable to white southerners even as he insisted that Confederate states could not return to the Union without taking steps to ensure the future end of slavery. Secretary of the Treasury Chase thought the effort misguided. “The Southern people whom we must conciliate,” he wrote in April 1863, “are the black Americans” and those whites willing to adjust immediately to a free-labor system. “All others,” he believed, “are naturally in sympathy with the rebellion.” Orestes Brownson pointed out that to allow slaveholders to retain control of black labor for a time appeared inconsistent with the logic of the Emancipation Proclamation. If the justification for ending slavery was military necessity, he observed, then abolition “must be immediate.”45
Despite Lincoln’s talk of gradualism and other actions to encourage southern Unionism, his efforts to create loyal governments in the South in 1863 failed to produce results. Andrew Johnson did not create a functioning civilian government in Tennessee, and nothing was accomplished by military governors in North Carolina, Arkansas, or Louisiana. A new approach seemed imperative. Moreover, in the wake of Union victories in the summer of 1863, the question of Reconstruction suddenly moved to the forefront of political debate, exacerbating factionalism within the Republican party. “The whole political community,” noted the New York Times, “seems to be plunging headlong into this discussion.” The