The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [186]
Much of the discussion covered familiar ground. One element, however, was new, reflecting the ideological changes unleashed by the war. Republicans condemned slavery not simply as a violation of basic human rights but as an affront to the nation itself. The institution violated the principle that each individual owed undivided loyalty to the nation-state. “The defiant pretensions of the master, claiming control of his slave,” declared Sumner, “are in direct conflict with the paramount rights of the national government.” The amendment’s second clause embodied this new sense of national empowerment. Traditionally, the federal government had been seen as the greatest threat to individual liberty; thus, the Bill of Rights protected civil liberties by restricting the actions of Congress, not the states. But, as the Chicago Tribune observed, “events have proved that the danger to…freedom is from the states, not the Federal government.” The second clause gave Congress seemingly unlimited authority to prevent actions by states, localities, and private individuals that sought to establish or restore slavery, a startling change in the federal system. The seemingly redundant words “or involuntary servitude” opened the door to congressional legislation against indentures or apprenticeship arrangements such as Lincoln had proposed.9
On April 8, 1864, the Senate approved the Thirteenth Amendment by a vote of 33 to 6. The four senators from Kentucky and Delaware and two northern Democrats voted no. The majority included all the Republicans, three Democrats from the North, and five border senators. Because the amendment envisioned immediate, uncompensated abolition by national action, the New York Herald called the result a rebuke to Lincoln, a declaration by Congress that “his petty tinkering devices of emancipation will not answer.” But in June, in a vote almost entirely along party lines, the amendment mustered 93 votes in the House, 13 short of the necessary two-thirds’ majority. Only four Democrats voted in favor.10
The Thirteenth Amendment was one of a number of measures relating to blacks’ postwar status debated in the first months of 1864. When Congress assembled, George W. Julian, chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, launched a campaign to repeal the joint resolution of 1862 that limited the confiscation of land to the owner’s lifetime. Long an enemy of “land monopoly,” Julian insisted that without economic autonomy the former slaves would be reduced to a situation “more galling than slavery itself.” Many members still resented what they considered Lincoln’s high-handedness when he insisted that Congress adopt the joint resolution before he agreed to sign the Second Confiscation Act. In 1864, each house approved a different measure repealing the 1862 resolution, although no joint measure was enacted. In any event, Lincoln saw the restoration of confiscated land as a means of promoting white southern Unionism. His promise to restore property other than slaves to southerners who took an oath of loyalty meant that the amount of land available for redistribution remained negligible.11
Also the subject of prolonged debate was the recommendation by the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission that Congress establish a Bureau of Emancipation to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom. Supporters insisted that emancipation had made blacks “wards of the republic” and that the federal government, as B. Gratz Brown, the Radical senator from Missouri, put it, had an obligation to prevent them “from being made serfs or apprentices” after the war ended. Democrats characterized the proposed bureau as a “sweeping and revolutionary” expansion of federal power. Even among