The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [178]
Lincoln devoted the greatest attention to Reconstruction in Tennessee and Louisiana. By the fall of 1863, Military Governor Andrew Johnson, who had persuaded Lincoln to exempt Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation, had, at the president’s urging, declared for emancipation. But when Lincoln announced the Ten Percent Plan, Johnson and his supporters were dismayed. Horace Maynard, a member of Congress from East Tennessee, where pro-Union families had suffered severely under Confederate rule, complained that the plan displayed “excessive liberality” to rebels. On his own initiative, Johnson added to Lincoln’s oath of future loyalty “a hard oath—a tight oath” whereby prospective voters had to pledge that they “ardently” desired Confederate defeat and the abolition of slavery. Despite numerous complaints from Tennessee, Lincoln allowed Johnson’s requirement to stand. He saw “no conflict,” he observed, between Johnson’s policy and his own.66
Johnson’s conversion to emancipation did not imply a sudden interest in the welfare of Tennessee’s blacks. He had risen to prominence in Tennessee politics as a self-proclaimed tribune of nonslaveholding yeomen and condemned the “slaveocracy” for monopolizing political power and oppressing poor whites. He would rather, he said in 1863, see all the slaves sent to “their fatherland…and Africa distinct from this earth, as a planet, out of the world’s orbit, rather than any injury should happen to the government.” But as white Tennesseans resisted his efforts to form a state government while blacks enlisted in the Union army, his outlook seemed to change. Johnson rejected demands by black leaders in Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville for the right to vote (which free blacks had enjoyed in Tennessee until 1835). But he sketched out a vision of Tennessee’s future in which the end of slavery would bring an “era of freedom” for both ordinary whites and emancipated slaves. The freedman would work for wages, enjoy “the fruits of one’s labor,” and “if he can rise by his own energies, in the name of God let him rise.” In October 1864, addressing a black gathering, Johnson, by then Lincoln’s vice presidential running mate, unilaterally decreed the end of slavery in Tennessee. “I will indeed be your Moses,” he promised, “and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage to a promised future of liberty and peace.” Early in 1865, having failed to get civilian government functioning, Johnson bypassed elections altogether and endorsed the assembling of a self-appointed convention of Unionists, which adopted a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery without compensation. This was approved in February by those Tennesseans allowed to vote under Johnson’s requirements.67
Of all the states where wartime Reconstruction was attempted, only Louisiana lay in the heart of the Confederacy. Here Lincoln invested his greatest hopes. Union forces, it will be recalled, in 1862 had occupied New Orleans and the nearby sugar parishes, a region with a considerable population of reluctant Confederates—former Whig planters, European immigrants, and northerners. The city was also home to a community of 11,000 free persons of color, many of them prosperous and well educated. Descended from unions between early French settlers and slave women or from free black immigrants from Haiti, they were strongly influenced by the currents of radical thought that swept the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution and again in 1848. If the Unionists could cooperate, the prospects for creating a loyal government seemed bright. In the fall of 1862 New Orleans voters sent Michael Hahn, an immigrant from Bavaria, and Benjamin Flanders, a New Hampshire–born teacher and newspaper editor, to Congress. They represented a Free State movement that saw emancipation as the key to remaking Louisiana in the image