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I

“WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE NEGRO?” The New York Times posed this question on the eve of Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, and as the end of the Civil War drew nearer, more and more Americans came to see it as the most difficult dilemma confronting the nation. But as Leonard Marsh, a northern pamphleteer, shrewdly observed at the war’s outset, this question had as much to do with whites as with blacks. It really meant, Marsh wrote, “how will their freedom affect us?” Or, to put it another way, what kind of society was post-slavery America to be?1

The Civil War unleashed a dynamic debate over the meaning of American freedom and the definition and entitlements of American citizenship, a debate that continues to this day. When the Thirty-eighth Congress assembled in December 1863, a writer in the Continental Monthly declared, “Reconstruction sounds the key-note of American politics today.” According to his secretary John Hay, Lincoln believed that Republicans agreed on most aspects of Reconstruction. “The only question,” Lincoln remarked, “is who constitute the State?” But that was the crucial point. Abolitionists, black and white, maintained that emancipation would remain incomplete until black men had been guaranteed the right to vote. Without the ballot, wrote the Weekly Anglo-African, freedom would be “unworthy of the name.” In a speech at Cooper Institute that December, Wendell Phillips objected to the lack of provision for black suffrage or equality before the law, indeed for any role whatever for blacks, in Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan. Lincoln’s approach, Phillips complained, “frees the slave and ignores the negro.” Presciently, he warned that the president’s invitation to southern whites to control the transition from slavery to freedom opened the door to “poor laws, vagrant laws, laws for debt” that would reduce the freedpeople to a new condition of servitude. Phillips praised Lincoln as “a growing man” whose views had changed enormously since the war began and might well change again. Abolitionists, he concluded, must persuade Lincoln to adopt “a method of reconstruction much safer and better than the one he has suggested.”2

The debate over Reconstruction was intimately connected to another political initiative in the first months of 1864. As Lincoln pressed for state-enacted emancipation in the border states and occupied South, abolitionists and many Republicans turned to a different route to full freedom: a constitutional amendment irrevocably abolishing slavery throughout the United States. Abolitionists had already launched a “fresh moral agitation” toward this goal, coordinated by the Women’s National Loyal League, headed by the abolitionist-feminists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In February 1864, two black men carried a “monster” petition with 100,000 signatures to the Senate floor and deposited it onto Charles Sumner’s desk. More petitions followed; by mid-1864 the number of signers had reached 400,000. Support for an amendment reached far beyond abolitionist ranks. In March, a correspondent reported to Lincoln that Boston’s merchants, who previously believed “that you must not interfere with the slave system,” now agreed “that slavery must be utterly destroyed before there can be any solid peace.”3

Just before Lincoln sent his annual message to Congress in December 1863, Congressman Isaac N. Arnold of Illinois urged him to include a recommendation for a change in the Constitution to rid the nation of slavery. Lincoln chose not to do so. As we have seen, he had decided to pursue abolition on a state-by-state basis as part of his plan for Reconstruction. Nonetheless, such amendments were quickly introduced in both houses. The final language, modeled on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, was hammered out in the Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by Lyman Trumbull: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their