This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [203]
In a moment of candor he once remarked that he could not claim to have controlled events but that events rather had controlled him. All in all, the events of war had not been kind to him. He had become the instrument through which more than he desired was being done. He wanted to restore something — the shape of a lost golden age, perhaps, which early America had thought that it possessed — and the past had gone beyond restoration. Among those who supported him (supported him reluctantly, and only because they could not help themselves) were men who wanted the very destruction and overturn which he himself most dreaded; hard men, made for hatred, to whom reconciliation was a paltry word and who would be happy to play the part of conquerors. As 1864 began, Lincoln was trying to lay his own hands on the peace before victory itself had been won.
In December of 1863 he had set forth his program, which was essentially an effort to get both seceded persons and seceded states back into the Union with the least possible difficulty. Pardon and restoration of full rights would go to any Confederate (with certain stated exceptions) who would swear to support the Constitution and the Union of the states and to abide by all of the Federal government’s acts and pronouncements in respect to slavery. And a state itself could return to its old position in the Union whenever as many as ten per cent of the state’s voters should re-establish a loyal Union government within that state. In effect, he was trying to get the citizens of southern states to make at least a start in the direction of rebuilding the old Union.
There were difficulties. Radical Republicans were asserting that the southern states, by the act of secession, had in effect committed suicide; they would have to be rebuilt anew, and the agency that must say how and when they could be rebuilt must be the Federal Congress, not the President. Furthermore, the first steps which Lincoln so greatly desired could be taken, obviously, only in such southern states as were already largely occupied by the Union army. The most conspicuous of these was Louisiana, a large part of which had been effectively held since the middle of 1862. Here was the logical place to make a beginning. Yet Louisiana had been ruled for a time by Ben Butler, with whom even the most Union-minded of Southerners would hesitate to co-operate; and after Butler’s removal there was divided Federal authority in the state, with purely military problems competing for attention with the problems of reconstruction, and the work went forward very slowly.
Nevertheless, the start was being made, and Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, that devoted politician and maladroit strategist, was in charge of it. As the winter progressed, Banks was calling for elections — election of a civilian governor and election of delegates to a convention that should create a new constitution. (In Washington, bitter-enders like Thaddeus Stevens and Ben Wade were sputtering furiously against all of this, but the work was going forward.) The basic complication lay in the fact that Banks’s effort to reconstruct Louisiana politically was going hand in hand with an effort to conquer another section of the Confederacy by force of arms, and under Banks’s handling the two projects got in each other’s way. Banks was to lead a military expedition up the Red River toward Texas. This would complete the occupation of Louisiana, would enable a Union army to move down toward the Texas border — thereby, presumably, putting the fear into Napoleon III of France, who had been ostentatiously fracturing the Monroe Doctrine by installing luckless Maximilian on the throne in Mexico — and just incidentally it should scoop up considerable quantities of cotton for the hungry textile mills of New England, with whose problems General Banks was closely familiar.
So Banks was a busy man in this winter of 1864, and Louisiana was buzzing with activities which unfortunately were not entirely