The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [201]
Lincoln made no comment on the repeal or on the agitation by northern blacks for greater rights. But what John Cochrane, New York’s attorney general, called “the great problem of the free races” unavoidably presented itself as Congress once again debated Reconstruction. The issue was made more urgent by the actions of the government of Louisiana, the showcase for Lincoln’s Reconstruction initiative. The new legislature rejected the Quadroon Bill, which would have extended the right to vote to free men of color possessing three-quarters’ white ancestry, and made no appropriation for black education. The free blacks of New Orleans found that “vagrancy” and curfew regulations issued as part of Nathaniel P. Banks’s labor system did not distinguish between themselves and the freedpeople, placing severe restrictions on their traditional freedom of movement.66
Soon after the Louisiana constitutional convention of 1864, a group of free blacks established the New Orleans Tribune as a rallying point for Louisiana Radicalism. As editor they hired Jean-Charles Houzeau, a Belgian astronomer and journalist who had emigrated to the United States in 1858 and whose political outlook, like theirs, had been shaped by the heritage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The Tribune launched an assault on the army’s labor system as a reincarnation of slavery and demanded the right to vote not only for the free blacks but also for their “dormant partners,” the emancipated slaves. Houzeau made the Tribune a journal widely respected among northern Republicans and known even in Europe (it received a letter in 1865 from the great French novelist Victor Hugo). In January 1865 a convention of the National Equal Rights League assembled in New Orleans, bringing together urban free blacks and freedpeople from the countryside to press for complete civil and political equality. “We no longer have classes or castes among us,” declared the Tribune. “We are made one people and one nation…. Liberty must be the same for all.”67
Although the government of Louisiana made no response to these developments, Lincoln remained committed to its success. Failure in Louisiana, he wrote in November 1864, would “gladden the heart” of every enemy of the Union and “every advocate of slavery.” In his annual message to Congress the following month, Lincoln praised the “loyal State governments with free constitutions” that he had helped to establish. But complaints against the Louisiana regime received an increasingly sympathetic hearing in Congress, exacerbating divisions within the Republican party over Reconstruction. “The question of extending the right of universal suffrage to the colored race,” observed the Washington Morning Chronicle, “is…more difficult of practical solution than any which has ever been presented to the people of this country.” But events in Louisiana placed it on the political agenda.68
In December 1864 Charles Sumner and other Republican leaders held repeated discussions with Lincoln about “the duty of harmony between Congress and the Executive.” Sumner thought they had reached agreement on a plan to recognize the legitimacy of the Louisiana government and at the same time require other Confederate states to accord “all citizens” equality before the law and the right to vote before readmission to the Union. “If this arrangement is carried out,” Sumner remarked, “it will be an immense political act.” Too immense, it turned out, to succeed.69
James Ashley soon introduced in the House of Representatives a Reconstruction bill embodying the arrangement described by Sumner. However, while Lincoln privately assured key legislators that he would use his influence to get Louisiana to enfranchise at least some blacks, he objected to putting black suffrage in the bill. Lincoln still believed that voting rights were a matter for the states, not the federal government, to determine. In an effort to make the bill acceptable to the