The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [208]
On April 9, Grant accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Although the last Confederate force, Kirby Smith’s army in Texas, would not capitulate until May, the Civil War had ended. Shortly after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln revoked permission for the Confederate legislature of Virginia to convene, which the cabinet and Republican members of Congress who remained in Washington had unanimously opposed. To Lincoln’s annoyance, Campbell had interpreted his gesture as an invitation to negotiate an armistice and peace terms, including Virginia’s right to representation in Congress and “the condition of the slave population.” In any event, Lee’s surrender rendered the matter moot.15
Reconstruction now emerged as the foremost problem confronting the nation. On April 11, having returned to Washington, Lincoln delivered a speech on this subject to a large crowd that had gathered at the White House. According to one newspaper, he prepared it with “unusual care and deliberation.” In part, it was a defense of the new government of Louisiana, to whose support Lincoln had devoted so much effort. In the past month, events in that state had taken an ominous turn. On the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, Governor Michael Hahn resigned after being elected to the Senate and was replaced by J. Madison Wells, a Unionist planter who had owned more than 100 slaves before the Civil War. Quickly taking stock of the political situation as the war neared its end, Wells realized that Confederates who took an oath of loyalty, thus restoring their right to vote, would soon vastly outnumber white supporters of his regime. He promptly began replacing Hahn’s appointees in local and statewide offices with conservative Unionists and former rebels.16
In his speech, Lincoln acknowledged that the problem of Reconstruction was “fraught with great difficulty.” Nonetheless, he again sought to bolster northern support for the Louisiana regime, while also trying to find common ground with his Republican critics. In fact, Lincoln had asked Charles Sumner to stand on the White House balcony while he delivered the address. Lincoln noted that when he issued his Ten Percent Plan, every member of the cabinet had approved it and he had received “many commendations…and not a single objection to it, from any professed emancipationist.” (The next day, Chase wrote to Lincoln saying he had in fact objected to the exclusion of blacks from voting but admitted he had not done so strongly, not wanting to appear “pertinacious.”) Lincoln praised Louisiana’s accomplishments—the abolition of slavery, public education for both races, and the fact that abolition had been immediate, without an apprenticeship program of the kind he himself had once favored. However, he continued, it was “unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored men.” For the first time, Lincoln acknowledged that “the colored man…desires” the right to vote. He now repeated the sentiment of his private letter to Governor Hahn in 1864: “I would myself prefer that [the vote] were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” This was a remarkable statement. No American president had publicly endorsed even limited black suffrage. At this time only six northern states allowed black men to vote.17
What became known as his “last speech” (a description