Themes of the American Civil War

go beyond suffrage for freeborn blacks and adopt the principle of universal suffrage of all men, unconvicted of crime, who can read and write, and have a fair knowledge of the Constitution of the State and of the United States.”
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Here was a bold declaration in favor of impartial suffrage for all races—
including not only the gens de couleur but also the freedmen who would be liberated by the new Constitution. In order that his views should reach a wider public, Chase also wrote to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York
Tribune, suggesting that the influential Republican editor should indicate his support for black suffrage. In spite of his record as a pragmatic reformer
Greeley agreed that the issue should be aired in public. “‘Conservatism’
will howl at the thought of Negro Suffrage he responded on December but we shall have to keep it horrified fora while yet.”
22
At this stage Chase’s views ran ahead of those held by Durant and his free black allies in New Orleans. Few white Louisiana Unionists or gens de couleur
were enthusiastic about admitting tens of thousands of recently liberated bondsmen to the body politic. They were certainly anathema to the sugar planters of southern Louisiana whose views exerted a significant influence on the military government. As a result the Banks regime, lacking as it did any instructions to the contrary from Lincoln, made no attempt to register any blacks during the winter of 1863–64 and began to throw its weight behind the moderate Unionist faction headed by Durant’s rival, Michael
Hahn. Outraged, the predominantly mulatto creoles dispatched a two-man delegation to Washington with a petition praying for the enfranchisement of free blacks in Louisiana.
By the time Arnold Bertonneau, a rich wine merchant, and J. B. Roudanez,
a plantation engineer, arrived at the capital in March they discovered that radical Republicans in Congress were already worried about the apparent conservatism of Lincoln’s Ten Percent plan. The latter, it was alleged, made it too easy for rebels to regain power and offered no security for loyal citizens,
including the former slaves. As early as January, 1864, one of Chase’s longtime allies in Ohio, Representative James M. Ashley, attempted to place onto the House agenda a Bill providing for the enrolment of all loyal male citizens over the age of twenty-one. His effort failed but it was nonetheless an important statement that radicals did not see partial suffrage as an adequate solution to the problem of reestablishing Southern loyalty to the Union. Keen to make universal or impartial suffrage a fundamental element of Reconstruction, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a staunch supporter of black civil rights and another Chase ally, persuaded the two creoles to adapt their petition to suit the broader national goals of the radical Republicans. Whereas the original document had called for the enfranchisement of colored men who were free before the Civil War
(i.e., the gens de couleur), the revised petition requested the suffrage for all
Louisiana blacks whether born slave or free, especially those who have
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vindicated their right to vote by bearing arms.”
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On March 12 Bertonneau and Roudinez were granted an audience at the White House. As Chase’s meeting with the president in December had already revealed, Lincoln was now personally in favor of some form of suffrage for African-Americans
(quite probably because he sensed that support for reform was gaining momentum within the Republican Party and genuinely respected the role which blacks were now playing in the war. The following day he took positive action to spur suffrage reform in Louisiana by writing a brief letter to the state’s new Unionist governor, Michael Hahn, who had been elected on February 22 against the opposition of Durant and his ally in the New
Orleans customs house, Benjamin Flanders. The pro-Chase Flanders camp
(which had been outraged by Major General Banks’s insistence that elections should beheld under the unreformed antebellum constitution) had downplayed the issue of black suffrage during the campaign but Hahn’s supporters had made use of Durant’s alliance with the gens de couleur
to appeal to the racism of local white Unionists. In his letter to the governor
Lincoln asked if the forthcoming constitutional convention might not provide for partial suffrage extension to blacks. I barely suggest for your private consideration he wrote,
whether some of the colored people may not be let in—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.
But this is only a suggestion, not to the public, but to you alone.
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Although the historian LaWanda Cox has asserted that this letter reveals the gap between the radicals and Lincoln on black rights to have been smaller than often supposed, it is clear that, unlike the radicals, the President was not prepared to insist on partial suffrage—still lesson impartial or universal suffrage—as a fundamental condition of Reconstruction. Initially, his views had minimal impact on events in Louisiana. The Banks–Hahn administration did attempt to enrol mulattoes for the constitutional convention elections but legal restrictions, the extent of white supremacist feeling, and the tentative wording of Lincoln’s letter curtailed the effort. When the lilywhite convention met during the spring and summer of 1864 the delegates took care to meet Lincoln’s nonnegotiable demand for emancipation.
However, the furthest they were prepared to move on suffrage (and Lincoln’s wishes were made known to key members of the convention) was to make provision for the state legislature to enfranchise blacks at some point in the future.
While debate over Reconstruction remained an issue confined largely to political elites, African-American leaders believed that events were moving
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in the desired direction. Determined as ever to assert their rights, they lost no opportunity in the early months of 1864 to press the suffrage issue on a
Northern public preoccupied with the progress of the war. In April Frederick
Douglass spoke in Boston at a dinner held in honor of the two New Orleans creoles, Roudanez and Bertonneau. Present were many members of the antislavery elite of Massachusetts, among them the Republican governor,
John A. Andrew, and the veteran abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
Douglass urged his mainly white listeners to strike while the iron was hot.
“We are in a malleable state now, we are melted he insisted, but let the arm of this rebellion be broken, let their weapons be flung away, and I fear that again we shall mistake prosperity for righteousness, and forget those brave negroes who are standing up in defense of the government The gentlemen of Massachusetts, he urged, should exert their influence immediately for the complete, absolute, unqualified enfranchisement of the colored people of the South. . . The black abolitionist leader’s insistence on the need for haste may well have been influenced by an awareness that the franchise question was nearing the top of the Republican agenda. Although James Ashley’s black suffrage proposal had been shelved in January, twenty-two out of thirty-one Senate
Republicans had recently voted to strike the word white from a House Bill providing for elections in Montana Territory. By no means all of those moderates who voted for the measure regarded it as a test case for Southern
Reconstruction. There was, after all, no doubt that Congress had the constitutional authority to impose suffrage qualifications on a federal territory and there were few African-Americans living in Montana at the time.
However, Charles Sumner, who led the fight to enfranchise all adult male citizens in the territory, clearly intended that the vote should be regarded as a precedent for the upcoming debate over a congressional alternative to Lincoln’s Ten Percent plan. The refusal of roughly a third of House
Republicans to support the Senate’s actions eventually forced the upper chamber to withdraw from its amendment but in May Sumner tried to attach franchise extension to a Bill to amend the charter of Washington, DC. This time he failed to secure majority backing from copartisans in the Senate.
In June Congress finally passed the Wade–Davis Reconstruction Bill. No provision was made for black suffrage, in part because pragmatic radicals like Benjamin Wade of Ohio recognized the extent of opposition to the measure from conservative and moderate Republicans and chose to prioritize legislative control of Reconstruction policy over equal rights. Only Sumner and four other Senate radicals backed a motion to make impartial suffrage a central feature of congressional reconstruction.
By the summer of 1864 it appeared that the country was not ready for black suffrage. While war-driven events meant that there was significant support for the measure among Republicans in Washington, there was
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manifestly little unity on whether franchise extension should take the form of partial, impartial, or universal suffrage and even lesson the divisive constitutional question of whether the policy could actually be imposed on the rebel states. In the country at large there was minimal enthusiasm for the issue among whites. Indeed, with a crucial presidential election looming—
one which would determine whether the war was fought to a victorious conclusion—conservative Republicans were appalled that radicals in their own party would endanger the war effort through their advocacy of allegedly impractical measures. It is amazing tome wrote a splenetic Henry J.
Raymond, the editor of the pro-Lincoln New York Times,
to see men forcing the country into new contests as negro suffrage negro rights of all kinds in the midst of the greatest contest the world has seen fora hundred years & while that, too, is undecided.
For our sanguine expectations of victory will be blasted hopelessly,
if these new issues are permitted to distract the public mind & divide loyal men.
26
Raymond was right to fear divisions among the Union ranks. By mid the paucity of Union successes on the battlefield had combined with opposition to the President’s lenient Reconstruction policy to promote a concerted movement against Lincoln’s renomination by the Republican- dominated Union party coalition. Initially, Salmon P. Chase had hoped to benefit from the groundswell of dissent, but the President’s impressive grassroots popularity and control of the patronage had put paid to Chase’s covert candidacy at the beginning of the year. Abolitionists on the radical wing of the New England Antislavery Society, however, were in no mood to stomach four more years of the Railsplitter, and many of them united with dissident Democrats and German-American radicals to nominate John C.
Frémont for president in May, 1864. The Cleveland convention cheered a letter from Wendell Phillips calling for land and the ballot to be given to
Southern loyalists, black and white. It also adopted a platform advocating congressional control of Reconstruction and the adoption of a constitutional amendment to secure to all men absolute equality before the law.”
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Pro- suffrage men like Parker Pillsbury were far from happy with the vagueness of this latter clause but the presence of Democrats at the convention meant that it was the most radical plank they could achieve.
In the event black suffrage played only a minor role in the 1864 election campaign. The Democrats did try to use Republican backing for franchise extension to convince white voters that their opponents stood for racial amalgamation. But Lincoln, renominated by his party in June, had made no public endorsement of black rights beyond emancipation, and the Union platform remained predictably silent on the issue. As a result, when the tide
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of war turned in favor of the North after the fall of Atlanta in September,
Peace Democrats and Frémont supporters alike found their causes in terminal decline. Lincoln’s triumphant reelection in November appeared to make him master of events.

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