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president, whose standing with Congress had improved significantly because of his triumphal reelection, Ashley revised it to limit the right to vote to loyal whites and blacks who had served in the military. Weeks of debate followed, and the bill went through numerous incarnations. But with some Republicans insisting on black suffrage and others, along with all the Democrats, resisting it, it became “very clear,” Ashley remarked, “that no bill providing for the reorganization of the governments of loyal State governments in the rebel States can pass this Congress.”70

“The president’s Reconstruction policy stands,” declared the Springfield Republican. But Congress refused to count Louisiana’s 1864 electoral vote, and on the eve of adjournment a filibuster by Sumner prevented the seating of the senators elected by what he called “the pretended State Government” there. Lincoln, the Republican’s Washington correspondent reported, was “indignant” over Sumner’s action. But this did not seem to damage their cordial personal relationship. “Still he respects Mr. Sumner,” the journalist continued, “confers with him, and perhaps fears him.” A few days after the filibuster, Lincoln sent his private carriage to bring Sumner to the inaugural ball.71

When Congress adjourned at the beginning of March 1865, the issue of Reconstruction remained unresolved. With eight months set to elapse before the next Congress convened, Lincoln had a free hand in making and implementing policy. But Radicals preferred the issue to go over to the fall; in the meantime, said Ashley, “I hope the nation may be educated up to our demand for universal suffrage.” As for Lincoln, Sumner believed that while he was “slow in accepting truths…his mind is undergoing change.”72

Even the abolitionist movement could not agree on the next steps after emancipation. At the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January 1865, Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass spoke “with unusual warmth of manner” of the necessity of keeping Louisiana out of the Union. Otherwise, the rest of the southern states would return with similar laws, and “we should have slavery back again, in spirit if not in form.” In a nation that proclaimed itself an exemplar of democracy, Douglass declared, to deny blacks the right to vote “is to brand us with the stigma of inferiority.” To which William Lloyd Garrison responded that the suffrage was “a conventional right…not to be confused with the natural right” to freedom. Political equality would come, he believed, only with “industrial and educational development.” The Liberator embraced the “renovated” Louisiana regime. “O Garrison,” wrote the Boston Commonwealth, “this is not abolitionism.” The debate offered a preview of the split in the American Anti-Slavery Society that would take place the following May, when the members rejected Garrison’s proposal to declare victory and dissolve, Phillips replaced him as president, and the National Anti-Slavery Standard appeared with a new motto on its masthead: “No Reconstruction without Negro Suffrage.”73

In early 1865 an equally portentous question also appeared on the political horizon: should the federal government distribute land to the emancipated slaves? While the issue had been pressed by a few members of Congress in 1864, it acquired new urgency thanks to General William T. Sherman. Shortly after Lincoln’s reelection, Sherman and his 60,000-man army set out from Atlanta on the celebrated March to the Sea. They arrived in Savannah at the end of December, accompanied by some 20,000 slaves who had abandoned the plantations to follow the army. On January 12, 1865, at the urging of Secretary of War Stanton, who had traveled to Savannah, Sherman met with twenty leaders of the local black community, most of them Baptist and Methodist ministers. The conversation revealed that the black leaders possessed clear conceptions of slavery and freedom. Asked what he understood by slavery, Garrison Frazier, the group’s spokesman, replied that it meant “receiving by irresistible power the work