The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [183]
The Sea Islands, where no native white population remained to conciliate, was a special case. Elsewhere, Lincoln feared that talk of land redistribution would undermine efforts to win southern white support. His Reconstruction and amnesty plan had offered restoration of “all rights of property,” other than slaves, to Confederates who took the oath of loyalty. In February 1864 he directed the acting attorney general to exempt from the operation of the two confiscation acts southerners who did so.85
By 1864, with support for gradual emancipation and apprenticeship fading, Lincoln was moving toward the idea (anticipated in the Emancipation Proclamation) that former slaves should immediately go to work as free laborers under equitable conditions. That January he responded to an inquiry from Arkansas by writing that he would view “with great favor” a situation in which plantation owners accepted emancipation and hired their former slaves to “re-commence…cultivation…by fair contracts.” He would treat the freedpeople, he added, “precisely as I would treat the same number of free white people in the same relation and condition.” Such a step toward instituting “the free-labor system,” Lincoln continued, would help to secure the twin aims of the war: to “advance freedom, and restore peace and prosperity.”86
Soon afterward, mindful, perhaps, of the growing criticism of the labor systems of Generals Banks and Thomas, Lincoln advised the latter that when plantations were leased to loyal men in the Mississippi Valley, care should be taken to ensure “fairness to the laborers.” In February 1864 Lincoln sent General Daniel E. Sickles to the Mississippi Valley to report on how many Confederates were taking up his offer of amnesty, how Andrew Johnson’s regime in Tennessee was faring, and “the colored people—how they get along as soldiers, as laborers in our service, on leased plantations, and as hired laborers with their old masters.” The redoubtable Sickles, who had lost a leg at the battle of Gettysburg, embarked on a tour that took him to parts of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. He enjoyed a lavish reception at a plantation near New Orleans, complete with “some grotesque dancing by the youthful darkies.” Whether this enabled Sickles to assess the labor situation in the occupied South may be doubted. When he returned to Washington, he gave Lincoln his impressions of the journey verbally. Save for one letter about illicit trading with the enemy by army officers in Memphis, Sickles did not produce a written report. In August 1864 Lincoln met again with John Eaton and questioned him closely about the emancipated slaves. He asked about “the more remarkable colored men and women” who had escaped, what they might do when they returned home, and “what freedom meant to those who had attained it.”87
By 1864 Lincoln’s thoughts about ending slavery had changed in significant ways. In this, he reflected broader trends in northern public sentiment. Deeply rooted “theories and prejudices,” the New York Times observed in February 1864, were rapidly being “discarded.” “It is extraordinary,” the editors noted, “how completely the idea of gradual emancipation has been dissipated from the public mind everywhere by the progress of events.”88 The same, it could have added, was true of colonization. No new consensus, however, on the role of the former slaves in the postwar world had emerged. Lincoln himself viewed this question less on its own merits than in terms of its effect on securing white loyalty in the South and emancipation by state action. But in 1864, with Congress back in session, a presidential election looming, and concerns rising in the North over the course of wartime Reconstruction, the question of what should follow the end of slavery emerged as a battleground in national politics.
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“A Fitting, and Necessary Conclusion”: Abolition, Reelection, and the Challenge