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By Root 1720 0

by the St. Louis lawyer Charles D. Drake, to lobby Lincoln for the removal of General Schofield, whom they accused, with justification, of siding with their foes. Two days before their meeting with Lincoln, Frank Blair, in a speech in St. Louis, lashed out at the Radicals, opposing immediate emancipation. Despite his long association with the Blairs, Lincoln tried to avoid taking sides. He would not, he declared, get involved in “the political differences between radicals and conservatives.” He refused to oust Schofield but expressed regret that the onset of emancipation in Missouri had been put off to 1870. According to John Hay, Lincoln in October remarked that the Radicals would probably win control of Missouri, “and I do not object to it. They are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and in sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally. They are utterly lawless—the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with—but after all their faces are set Zionwards.” In December 1863 Lincoln did remove Schofield, replacing him with General William Rosecrans, who he hoped would play a more even-handed role in Missouri politics.62

The following fall, after many more months of charges and countercharges between the two factions, Radical Unionists elected Thomas C. Fletcher as governor. In January 1865, a constitutional convention decreed immediate abolition in Missouri as well as other reforms, including the establishment of a public school system and the end of imprisonment for debt. Thanks to Drake, who insisted that while blacks could not be “lifted into equality,” many “disqualifications, prohibitions, and degradations are to be removed,” to ensure that “freedom…is no empty name,” the new constitution granted blacks equal access to the courts and empowered the legislature to establish schools for black children. Drake himself favored black suffrage. But instead of expanding the right to vote, the convention established stringent loyalty requirements. Those entitled to vote approved the new constitution in June 1865.63

Unlike in the border states (other than Missouri, where martial law persisted for the entire war), wartime Reconstruction took place in the occupied Confederacy under the auspices of military rule. Here, too, Lincoln pressed for abolition by state action. The first Confederate state to embrace emancipation was the Restored Government of Virginia. Early in 1864, a diminutive constitutional convention of sixteen delegates abolished slavery, restricted suffrage to loyal whites, and provided for a system of public education for white children. Although it had no authority in most of Virginia and could not muster anywhere near the support of 10 percent of the voters of 1860, Lincoln continued to recognize this regime as Virginia’s legitimate government.64

Lincoln had long seen Arkansas, with considerable Unionist sentiment in its mountainous northwestern counties, as a promising place to create a loyal state government. As soon as he announced his Reconstruction plan, Lincoln dispatched a military officer to the state with forms to record the names of those who took the oath of loyalty. Lincoln advised the military commander, General Frederick Steele, to be sure to have a “free State constitutional provision in some unquestionable form” when a new government was established. A few days later, mindful of developments elsewhere, Lincoln added, “Of all things, avoid, if possible, a dividing into cliques.” Bypassing the holding of an election under the Ten Percent Plan, Arkansas Unionists organized a self-appointed constitutional convention, which assembled in Little Rock in January 1864. Lincoln directed Steele to cooperate with it. The delegates quickly approved a new constitution that abolished slavery, restricted suffrage to whites, and authorized the legislature to establish an indenture system for blacks modeled on the one in the Illinois constitution of 1818. They also passed an ordinance prohibiting the further entrance of blacks into the state, except under federal authority. The constitution was ratified