Black Suffrage and Wartime Reconstruction

African-Americans the grudging respect of many northerners, including racist Union troops, but in themselves such glorious deeds would not have been translated automatically into franchise extension. It was the growing realization, promoted strenuously by radical Republicans, that most white southerners were likely to prove ambivalent Unionists, even after military defeat, that finally brought the suffrage question center-stage.
In this respect Salmon Chase was ahead of the game. Seeking to build on Bates’s opinion during 1863, the Secretary took every opportunity to disseminate his belief that blacks were fellow human beings worthy of respect. Rightly conscious of the way in which language was used to depersonalize the mass of black slaves encountered by the Union armies,
he insisted that federal officials abandon the initially popular label of
“contraband” in favor of freedmen, Afric-Americans, blacks, negroes, [or]
colored citizens.”
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More important, perhaps, he labored to enshrine black suffrage as a central feature of government Reconstruction policy in the state of Louisiana, which began to emerge as the focal point fora potentially disastrous split between radical and non-radical Republicans in Washington and in the country at large.
In late January, 1863, several months after Union forces had occupied New Orleans and the surrounding sugar parishes, Major General Nathaniel
P. Banks, the federal commander of the Department of the Gulf, laid the foundations fora controversial labor system designed to keep Louisiana’s slaves at work on the sugar plantations. Slave-born blacks who did not enlist were to perform paid work in the fields at wage rates determined by the government. While the new system gradually came under attack from radicals for allegedly bolstering a status quo based on coercion,
President Lincoln chose to regard it as an acceptable form of apprenticeship and pressed on with his own policy of restoration. Suspicious of imposed solutions, and desirous of encouraging self-reconstruction on the part of
Southern whites, Lincoln told Banks in August, 1863, to make haste in creating a free state government in New Orleans. While he expressed a desire that local blacks should be liberated and educated by the new regime, the
President’s missive made no mention of black suffrage. Why should it have done Was it not the case that Louisiana blacks were a downtrodden race,
degraded (perhaps through no fault of their own) by slavery, and therefore incapable of voting as enlightened citizens of a modern, free-labor republic?
Even if Lincoln had privately favored franchise extension at this stage,
his political sixth sense would have told him that Northern voters would not accept it.
Chase’s determination to make loyalty the cornerstone of federal
Reconstruction policy gathered pace in late 1863 as Lincoln prodded his military commanders in New Orleans to redouble their efforts to hold elections fora new state legislature prior to the meeting of a constitutional
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Robert Cook

convention that would expunge slavery from the state’s organic law.
The Ohioan’s enthusiasm for black suffrage was not shared by any white
Louisiana Unionists (or, for that matter, his own faction of Treasury agents in New Orleans) but his commitment to franchise extension gelled neatly with the vociferous demand of local free blacks for political suffrage.
Uniquely (because of its former status as a French and Spanish port in the eighteenth century) New Orleans possessed a large population of around free blacks (mainly light-skinned mulattos), significant numbers of whom were wealthy, well educated, and enrolled in the armed forces of the United States. When election preparations finally got underway in late the gens de couleur agreed to petition the local military commander for the vote and, if unsuccessful, to take their case to Washington. Shortly afterwards Chase wrote to the president of the Free State Committee in New Orleans, Thomas Durant, making known his wish that colored citizens should be registered to vote in the forthcoming elections. This policy was, he said, in full conformity with the Attorney General’s opinion on black citizenship and required on the grounds of justice and the security of the Union.
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In spite of being a former slaveholder, Durant understood the political advantages of acting in conformity with a powerful patron in Washington and ingratiating himself with the assertive creole population of New Orleans.
Consequently, when he responded to Chase on December 4, he expressed himself in favor of enfranchising freeborn blacks as an act well founded in justice.”
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As Durant’s letter made its way to Washington President Lincoln finally delivered a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction designed to speedup the process of restoration and emancipation in the occupied South. Whenever 10 percent of Southern white voters in a rebel state had taken an oath of future loyalty to the Union they were invited to form a free state government which would abolish slavery and dispatch delegates to Congress. Significantly, there was no provision in this document for either limited black suffrage or the extension of even basic civil rights to blacks. Undaunted, Chase used Durant’s support for franchise extension to elicit what appears to have been the first endorsement of this policy from the White House. As Chase explained events to Durant at the end of the Secretary told the President of Durant’s views, whereupon Lincoln said he could see no objection to the registering of such citizens the gens

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