The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [185]
On February 10, 1864, Trumbull presented the amendment to the Senate. Various acts of Congress and the Emancipation Proclamation, he noted, had freed many slaves but had not destroyed the legal foundations of slavery. The only way of ridding the country of the institution and preventing its rebirth was to amend the Constitution. At first, not all Republicans agreed. Some, like Lincoln, preferred abolition to take place through state action. Others believed an amendment unnecessary; the war, they argued, gave Congress the power to abolish slavery by statute and it should do so immediately rather than going through the cumbersome amendment process. But as time went on, congressional Republicans rallied around the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln remained noncommittal. When John D. Defrees of Indiana asked him to endorse the proposal, Lincoln replied, “Our own friends have this under consideration now, and will do as much without a message as with it.”5
At first, it seemed possible that the amendment would attract significant Democratic support. James Brooks, a Democratic congressman from New York, surprised the House in February by declaring the abolition of slavery “a fixed fact, a fact accomplished.” Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland became the most prominent Democrat to endorse the amendment. Slavery, he declared, was “an evil of the highest character,” and “a prosperous and permanent peace” could never be achieved “if the institution is permitted to survive.” Johnson added that by escaping to Union lines at the first opportunity, slaves had demonstrated their “inextinguishable right to freedom.”6
As the spring went on, however, and election-year politics moved to the fore, Democratic willingness to support the amendment faded. The party’s congressmen increasingly reiterated the familiar arguments against abolition, among them that the end of slavery would lead inexorably to “amalgamation” and black political equality. These charges forced Republicans to try to delineate the basic rights that belonged to all Americans, which slavery had denied and emancipation would restore. All agreed that contractual relations must be substituted for the discipline of the lash and the master’s authority over the personal and family lives of the former slaves abolished. All denied Democratic charges that freedom automatically conferred the right to vote; this, they insisted, was a matter for individual states to regulate.7
Here, agreement ended. In keeping with long-standing traditions of federalism, some supporters of the amendment, like John Henderson of Missouri, insisted, “We give him no right except his freedom, and leave the rest to the States.” On the other end of the political spectrum, Radical Republicans embraced Sumner’s egalitarian vision. “A new nation” would emerge from the war, declared Isaac N. Arnold, one “wholly free,” in which “liberty, equality before the law is to be the great cornerstone.” James Harlan of Iowa listed among the evils of slavery the denial of the rights to marry, own property, testify in court, and enjoy access to education; presumably emancipation would carry with it these essential human entitlements. No phrase was repeated more often in these discussions than one Lincoln had emphasized in the late 1850s: the right to the fruits of one’s labor. Ebon Ingersoll of Illinois spoke of the “right to till the soil, to earn his bread by the sweat