The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [189]
Among those who participated in the Frémont movement were Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, both of whom dispatched letters to Cleveland. Phillips condemned Lincoln’s Reconstruction policy, which “puts all power into the hands of the unchanged white race [and] makes the freedom of the negro a sham.” His course was quite a departure for a man who had previously insisted that abolitionists should remain aloof from electoral campaigns and concentrate on changing public opinion. As one commentator reminded Phillips, his influence rested on his “absolute independence of politics…. I think you sacrifice your position, the moment you pronounce decisively for any man as president.”20
Assembling a week before the national convention of the Union party (as the Republicans had rechristened themselves to attract Democrats) was to meet in Baltimore, the Cleveland gathering had little chance of derailing Lincoln’s nomination. Most Radical Republicans remained aloof from the Frémont movement. The Chicago Tribune, Lincoln’s frequent critic, called the convention “the protracted and noisy travail of a few hundred malcontents.” Sumner, the Senate’s leading advocate of black rights, did not endorse Frémont, partly because of his close personal relationship with Lincoln and his wife. Nor did Thaddeus Stevens, the most outspoken Radical in the House.21
Nonetheless, the prospect of a split in the party posed a serious problem for Lincoln’s reelection campaign. No doubt as a response to Frémont’s nomination, Lincoln directed Senator Edwin Morgan, chair of the National Union Executive Committee, to make a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery the “key note” of his speech opening the national convention. Morgan did so, and the platform included a plank demanding the “utter and complete extirpation” of slavery via such an amendment. “Tremendous applause” greeted the reading of this provision. The platform went on to demand the “unconditional surrender” of the Confederacy and singled out for praise the Emancipation Proclamation and enlistment of black soldiers. It said nothing about the divisive issue of Reconstruction and avoided the question of equality before the law for blacks other than soldiers, who, it proclaimed, were entitled to the protection of the laws of war “without regard to distinction of color.” In his letter accepting the nomination, Lincoln for the first time called for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, describing it as “a fitting, and necessary conclusion” to the war effort that would make permanent the joining of the causes of “Liberty and Union.”22
Lincoln’s nomination was a foregone conclusion, but two other questions aroused controversy at the convention: the seating of contested delegations and the choice of vice president. Predictably, rival delegations presented themselves from Missouri. The convention voted overwhelmingly to seat the Radicals, demonstrating how thoroughly the Blairs’ racist screeds had alienated mainstream Republicans. The twenty-two Missouri delegates then proceeded to cast their votes for General Grant, the only departure from unanimity in Lincoln’s renomination. Delegations also presented themselves from six Confederate states. Some Republicans welcomed them as harbingers of their party’s future extension into the South. But critics of Lincoln’s wartime Reconstruction policy claimed that no legitimate loyal governments existed in these states. By a two-to-one margin, the convention admitted the delegations from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee as full members, and those from Virginia and Florida as nonvoting participants. It refused recognition to a biracial group from Beaufort, South Carolina (a state, like Florida, where no