The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [187]
Congress did manage to enact other measures weakening slavery and expanding the rights of black Americans. In June 1864 it repealed the Fugitive Slave Act, which had incongruously remained on the books despite emancipation. The session also enacted the law, mentioned in the previous chapter, providing equal pay for black soldiers. Charles Sumner pushed a number of other measures to purge racial discrimination from the statute book. At one point, Reverdy Johnson complained that half the Senate’s time was taken up with Sumner’s equal rights proposals. Congress rescinded the prohibition on the employment of blacks to carry the mails (a step Sumner had unsuccessfully proposed in 1862) and allowed testimony by blacks in federal courts and judicial proceedings in the District of Columbia. The Senate also agreed to Sumner’s proposal to bar streetcar companies in the District from excluding black passengers, but the bill died in the House. Lincoln was a passive observer of Sumner’s crusade; the president, Sumner complained, was “not moved to help” on any of these matters when “a word from him…would have saved me much trouble.” But Lincoln signed into law those bills that managed to pass.13
Another harbinger of postwar debates in the spring of 1864 came when Congress considered a bill to create a territorial government for Montana. No blacks were known to reside there, but Radicals insisted that the suffrage not be restricted by race. The nation, complained Senator John P. Hale, was “calling on this colored race to fight for us” yet remained unwilling to confront the “absurd and barbarous prejudice” that denied them one of the basic “privileges of freemen.” But Democrats and conservative Republicans warned of starting down the road to “negro social as well as political equality.” Senator James R. Doolittle pointed out that regulating the suffrage was universally regarded as a “right which belongs to a state,” not to Congress. Moreover, he reminded Republicans, “a presidential canvass” was on the horizon and the party must not saddle itself with advocacy of black suffrage. Doolittle’s argument resonated with many Republicans. The New York Times reprinted his speech and the editor, Henry J. Raymond, wrote, “I agree with every word of it.” Raymond found it “amazing” that Radicals were bent on “forcing the country into new contests of negro suffrage and negro rights of all kinds.” In the event, the House adopted the Montana bill with suffrage limited to whites; the Senate removed the racial qualification; the House refused to recede; and its version became law.14
Clearly, Republicans had not arrived at a consensus about the status of blacks in the postwar world. Their differences affected how they viewed the upcoming election. No sitting president had run for reelection since Martin Van Buren in 1840; none had won a second term since Andrew Jackson. Many Republicans seemed uneasy about the prospect of a second Lincoln administration. “You would be surprised in talking with public men,” Lyman Trumbull wrote in February 1864, “to find how few when you come to get at their real sentiments are for Mr. Lincoln’s reelection. There is a distrust and fear that he is too undecided and inefficient ever to put down the rebellion.” Some Republicans suspected that Lincoln was not fully committed to ending slavery. “His emancipation,” charged Martin F. Conway, the Radical congressman from Kansas, “is that of Henry Clay,…gradual and ‘compensatory,’” unsuited to the “new world” the war had brought into being. The moderate John Sherman told the Senate that Lincoln had acted only after the country “became wearied” by his reluctance to move against slavery.15
To be sure, Lincoln enjoyed deep support