The Coming Question Black Suffrage at the Close of the Civil War

the North. Large numbers of Republicans in Washington, moderates as well as radicals, rejected such conservatism as likely to threaten the security of the Union after the war. Traitors must be punished loyal southerners (black and white) should be allowed to protect themselves through the ballot box;
and Congress was empowered under the Constitution to guarantee a republican form of government to every state in the Union.
Against a background of strident black and abolitionist calls for suffrage reform during early 1865, Congress debated anew Reconstruction Bill which radicals hoped would inject some much-needed steel into the government’s
Southern policy. At first it seemed that an intraparty compromise between the President and radical Republicans might be possible. The original version of James Ashley’s Reconstruction Bill proposed to recognize the Unionist government of Louisiana while enfranchising blacks in other Southern states. Lincoln liked much of what he saw in the Bill but, as recounted by his secretary, John Hay, thought one or two sections rather calculated to conceal a feature which might be objectionable to some Among these was the provision for black voting and jury service. According to Hay, Banks agreed with the President. What you refer to the general told Lincoln,
“would be a fatal objection to the Bill. It would simply throw the Government into the hands of the blacks, as the white people under that arrangement would refuse to vote.”
28
The administration’s reluctance to impose even limited franchise extension on Southern whites combined with the radicals enthusiasm for reform to destroy any hopes of compromise. Ashley’s Bill eventually died in the House and a radical filibuster in the Senate led by Charles Sumner prevented the recognition of Louisiana. Stalemate on these issues did not prevent Congress from creating a Freedmen’s Bureau to oversee the transition from slave to free labor in the South or, even more momentously, from passing the Thirteenth Amendment to extirpate slavery from the national domain. However, the plain fact is that, by the spring of 1865, black suffrage had not yet received official endorsement from the federal government.
As the Civil War drew to a close the Republican Party was seriously split over black suffrage. Much support existed for the measure among radicals and moderates. Although the fear of grassroots racism caused most (but by no means all) Republicans to maintain a pragmatic silence on the controversial topic of enfranchising Northern blacks, the notion that the ballot could bean important weapon in the hands of the loyal freedmen appealed to supporters of laissez-faire as well as state intervention within the ruling party. If blacks did not merit the franchise as equal men or because of their service to the Union, then they might well be entitled to it on the grounds of national security. Such arguments were debated increasingly seriously in the Northern press during the opening months of 1865 and even garnered the grudging support of conservative Republicans such as Samuel
Black Suffrage
•
225

Bowles, whose Springfield Republican endorsed impartial suffrage nearly a month before Appomattox.
29
Given the momentum on this issue generated by blacks and their antislavery allies and the Northern public’s war-driven attachment to Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, it is not impossible that a decisive commitment to partial or even impartial suffrage on the part of the White House in early 1865 could have made the measure an intrinsic feature of postwar Reconstruction policy. To the last, however,
the President’s attitude to the reform remained a cautious one. Influenced by his own border-state Whiggery, a temperamental dislike of extreme measures, an astute awareness of white racism among the voters, and a genuine respect for the role that blacks had played in defeating the
Confederacy, Lincoln found himself, in his last public address, willing to declare a personal preference for partial suffrage but still unable to demand it as a condition of restoration. Convinced that the South’s military defeat might not prove to be the end of the rebellion, radicals like Chase were still vigorously pressing their views on Lincoln in the final week of his life. I am now convinced that universal suffrage is demanded by sound policy and impartial justice alike wrote the new Supreme Court chief justice anxiously on April Three days later, on the morning before the President’s assassination, Chase was driving over to the White House to discuss the role of universal suffrage in Reconstruction when he abruptly changed his mind on the grounds that my talk might annoy him Lincoln and do harm rather than good.”
31
Chase’s sense that the President might have had a bellyful of his conversation could well betaken as an indication that Lincoln was equally satiated with radical demands for black suffrage. However, even this interpretation does not necessarily mean that franchise extension was dead in the water by April, 1865, and that only Andrew Johnson’s excessively lenient attitude to the white South and the Republicans alleged need for black votes in the
North were responsible for the party’s decision to commit itself to black suffrage after 1867. Given his own personal preferences, and his proven capacity for intellectual growth on racial matters, it is likely that, had Lincoln lived, early evidence of postwar Confederate obstructionism would have wrought an intraparty consensus on limited suffrage by the end of There was much left for veteran campaigners like Frederick Douglass to do, but at the end of the Civil War African-Americans had sound reasons for thinking that their contribution to the nation’s survival would not be in vain.
Notes
1.
A. Lincoln, Last public address April 11, 1865, in RP. Basler, ed, The Collected Works

Download 2.25 Mb.

Share with your friends: