How Winfield Scott’s Plan to Put a Fatal Squeeze on the Rebellion

A Civil War era illustration of Winfield Scott's  Anaconda Plan to win the war against the Confederacy.

On May 3, 1861 aged Lt. General Winfield Scott, Commanding General of the United States Army, presented President Abraham Lincoln and his Cabinet, with his Anaconda Plan to conduct the war against secessionist rebel states.    The plan was widely derided by the press and public, which believed that a quick, decisive battle with the main Confederate army in Virginia would win the War of Rebellion.  Scott knew better.  He anticipated a long and bloody conflict.  

Lincoln may have wished for a short, glorious war, but the former Black Hawk War militia Captain read everything on military strategy and tactics that he could lay his hands on in the Library of Congress and sensed that his Commanding General may be right. Although he did not accept Scott’s proposal in every detail, questioned his timeline, and felt he had to order a major attack on Richmond to keep public support, from that point on despite the public ridicule and outcry the President conducted the war broadly on Scott’s plan.

The plan called for:   

1. Blockade ports in the Atlantic and Gulf to reduce foreign supplies and cotton and tobacco exports from Confederate ports.

2. Blockade the Mississippi River to reduce grain and meat shipments from the western to eastern Confederacy and foreign supplies through neutral Mexico. 

3. Control the Tennessee River Valley and a march through Georgia to prevent cooperation among the eastern Confederate states. 

4. Demonstrations against Confederate capital to keep the main Rebel Army pinned down and on the defensive with a campaign by Army troops with Navy support along the James River. 

And that is pretty much exactly how the war was won by the Union.  

Commanding General of the Army Winfield Scott presents his plan to Abraham Lincoln and his Cabinet. 

The Navy successfully blockaded most Confederate ports and captured key ports like Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans.  Western troops, experiencing much greater success than the ponderous Army of the Potomac in the East, secured the length of the Mississippi with the capture of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863 (coincidently the also the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg) splitting the Confederacy in two.  Another Yankee Army drove down the Tennessee River protecting the loyal border state of Kentucky, splitting divided Tennessee, and setting up Sherman’s campaign through the railroad and industrial heart of the South in northern Alabama and Georgia, including the capture of Atlanta, which cut off the lower South.  

Campaigns in Virginia and along the James, under incompetent leadership were long, bloody, and inconclusive until the end, but without the logistical support of the rest of the nation, Lee’s legendary Army of Northern Virginia was doomed.  Just about the way Scott foresaw.  

In 1861 Scott was winding down a 47-year Army career serving 14 presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln.   He served in the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars, Black Hawk War, and Mexican War.  He was the Commanding General of the Army for twenty years, longer than anyone before or since and was the first officer since George Washington to carry the rank of Lt. General.  No other officer in American history served with such distinction at every rank—militia enlisted man, artillery captain, infantry regimental commander, leader of a victorious army in the field, and Commanding General.  He has been called the greatest American soldier ever.

General Scott in full regalia at the beginning of the Civil War.

Yet he also cut something of a ridiculous figure.  His once powerful 6-foot 3-inch frame frame ballooned to over 300 pounds.  Notoriously vain, he swathed that mass in outrageously gaudy uniforms with gigantic epaulets, extravagant gold braid and decoration, every medal he was ever awarded, topped off with a great Napoleonic Era plumed hat.  Ailing from both gout and narcolepsy—uncontrollably lapsing into sleep—he knew that he would not be able to take command of his troops in the field. 

Instead, he offered field command to fellow Virginian Col. Robert E. Lee, universally regarded as the ablest officer in the service.  Unfortunately, unlike Scott, who unhesitatingly placed his loyalty to his nation over that of his native state, Lee chose Virginia and the Confederacy.  

Scott had to entrust the command of the rapidly swelling Volunteer army to the untried hands of Brigadier Gen. Irvin McDowell.  Scott despaired of both McDowell and the ill trained, short term enlisted Volunteers.  During his whole career he advocated for a highly trained professional army with militias and volunteers called to service and thoroughly trained before introduction to combat.  

Instead of ending his career abruptly, young artillery Captain Winfield Scott's clash with the Army's Commanding General James Wilkinson in 1808 enhanced his reputation when Wilkinson was exposed as a Spanish agent and treasonous plotter.

In 1808, as a young Virginia lawyer and a corporal in the militia cavalry, he secured an appointment as a Captain of Artillery in the tiny Regular Army.  He made his mark early by crossing his superior, Commanding General James Wilkinson, a corrupt scoundrel and innervate plotter.  Wilkinson had him court-martialed for insubordination and suspended for a year.  After Wilkinson was exposed as Spanish secret agent—just one of his many intrigues that included plotting with Aaron Burr to set up an independent inland republic—Scott was able to resume his duties with his reputation enhanced.  

In the War of 1812, he made his mark as a commander and a hero.  Captured in the Battle of Queenston Heights in 1812 when the New York Militia refused to cross into Canada in support of his Regulars, Scott was paroled and went to Washington to appeal to raise regiments of regular troops. 

The following year as a full colonel he planned and led the amphibious assault on Ft. George which required a coordinated crossing of the Niagara River and a landing from Lake Ontario, which was considered the most brilliant American maneuver of the war.  

In 1814 as a brevet Brigadier General Scott commanded the American First Brigade in the Niagara campaign.  He trained and drilled his Regulars to a fine edge for months.  But unable to secure regulation blue cloth for their uniforms, outfitted them sharply in gray with tall shako caps.  When the British saw them marching in disciplined ranks into battle, a horrified officer exclaimed, “That’s not the Terrytown militia.  Those are by God Regulars!”  

American Regular Army troops trained by Col. Winfield Scott proved that they were the match of British veterans at the battles of Chippewa and Lundy's Lane in the American attempt to invade Canada during the War of 1812, but Scott was grievously wounded in action.

Those regulars soundly whipped veteran British troops at in the Battle of Chippewa and then held the battlefield at fiercely fought Lundy’s Lane, where Scott and overall American commander Major General Jacob Brown were both severely injured.  

Although the invasion of Canada was stalled, Scott was hailed as a hero for showing that American troops could beat British professionals in a stand-up battle.  The battles were commemorated at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, where the Corps of Cadets still wears grey uniforms and shakos.  And the Confederate Army, dominated by West Pointers would, ironically adopt a gray uniform.  

In the years after the war, Scott turned to the routine occupation of a Regular Army Officers—Indian wars.  Scott was assigned command of 1000 Regulars and Volunteers from the East to relieve expiring volunteers units in the Black Hawk War of 1832.  Unfortunately, the men brought the cholera with them, not only rendering them unfit for service, but unleashing a deadly epidemic in the West.  Although Scott never got to the battlefield, he arrived on the scene to play a critical role in negotiating Black Hawk’s surrender and drafting a peace treaty.  

Three years later he was commanding a large column fruitlessly chasing hostiles in the Florida swamps during the Second Seminole War.  

No sooner was that bit of business concluded than President Andrew Jackson called on Scott to be the Federal brawn behind the Force Act, meant to compel South Carolina to honor the Tariff of Abominations in the face of Nullification threats.  Sent with reinforcements to the garrison at Ft. Sumner at Charleston, South Carolina, Scott had to juggle the bellicose desire of the President to “Hang the traitors,” and Joel R. Poinsette’s delicate task of rallying South Carolina Unionists while a new tariff acceptable to the state was moved through Congress.  

He got high marks for both his strong military resolution and for local diplomacy.  When the city caught fire, he dispatched troops from the garrison to help quell the blaze—and improved relations with the locals. 

With the crisis passed Jackson’s successor President Martin Van Buren turned to Scott to enforce the Cherokee Removal from the Eastern states.  Scott disapproved of the policy but did a soldier’s duty.  He considered it the low point of his career.  He was able to negotiate the voluntary removal of a large number under the leadership of Chief John Ross and managed to round up other bands with a minimum of bloodshed.  He tried, as far as possible, to make conditions on the march tolerable, ordering rides, assistance, and extra rations for children, the elderly, and infirm.  Where his reliable Regulars were in charge, things went relatively smoothly.

But many bands were escorted by undisciplined volunteers who abused, harassed, and stole from their charges without mercy.  Scott meant to personally accompany the first body of evacuees on the march west from Athens, Georgia but was recalled to Washington for a delicate diplomatic mission upon reaching Nashville.  

Scott was sent to the Maine/Canada border to negotiate a peace in the bloodless Aroostook War which threatened to erupt into another shooting war with the British.  For his success and service, he was promoted to Major General, the highest rank active in the Army.  

Scott repeated as a diplomat when he negotiated a solution to another border crisis with Britain, this one over St. John Island in the Pacific Northwest in 1859. 

                                

                                            Major General Winfield Scott at Vera Cruz in the Mexican War.

But first there was the Mexican War.  President James Knox Polk forced the war on Mexico by moving troops into disputed land between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers. This army, made up mostly of volunteers under the command of Scott’s service rival Zachary Taylor scored victories in heavy fighting at Monterey and Buena Vista but was hundreds of miles north of the capital city, separated by daunting desert.  

Scott conceived of a second attack by a sea landing at the port of Veracruz and driving quickly to Mexico City.  He executed the first major amphibious assault in American history when he successfully landed 12,000 Regular Army, Marines, and well-trained Volunteers and all their artillery and baggage outside the fortified city.  

In coordination with the Naval Squadron under the command of Commodore Mathew Perry, he laid siege to the fortified city, which was reduced by Army artillery and naval gunfire and surrendered after 12 days.  With the port open to keep his supply line clear, Scott began his march west, roughly following the route of Cortez.  Yellow Fever struck the Americans and Scott was only able to move with 8,500 healthy troops, among them many future Civil War generals including Lee, U.S. Grant, George Meade, and Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson.  

Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna moved from the Mexico City at the head of 12,000 well-armed and trained troops.  He entrenched across the road at Cerro Gordo, roughly halfway to the city.  Instead of a frontal assault, Scott sent artillery into the rugged mountains and enfiladed the Mexicans in deadly fire and flanked the dug-in Mexicans, who were routed with heavy casualties.  

Several other sharp engagements marked the march to the capital, culminating in the attack on the Mexican Military Academy at the Castle of Chapultepec.  When that fell, Scott negotiated a peaceful entry to the city. 

The Duke of Wellington upon studying Scott’s campaign declared him to be “the greatest living general.”  The offensive is still studied and much of later Army combat doctrine was drawn from the experience.  

The President appointed Scott the Military Governor of Mexico City, where he drew praise for enforcing bans on looting and molestation of citizens.  He threaded the thorny issue of what to do with the captured San Patricios—Irish deserters from the U.S. Army who took up the Mexican cause.  He was appalled when a court martial sentenced 72 of them to hang.  The former lawyer scoured his law books to find excuses to vacate the sentences of as many as possible.  He objected to the death penalty in 22 of the cases and later pardoned or commuted the sentences of 15 more.  

With Scott still on administrative duty in Mexico City, his rival Taylor arrived back in the States and won the Presidency on the Whig ticket.  Scott was sure he would have been a better man for the job.  Taylor died leaving Millard Fillmore to complete his term.  

Shattered over slavery, the Whigs took 54 ballots to nominate Winfield Scott as their candidate in 1852.  He was trounced by the handsome non-entity Democrat Franklin Pierce, a subordinate Volunteer general in the Mexican War.  Despite the loss, he served the new President loyally as Commanding General of the Army.

When the Democrats in 1852 nominated handsome, dashing Franklin Pierce, one of Scott’s less distinguished subordinate Volunteer generals in Mexico, the Whig convention stalemated before finally dumping Fillmore and nominating Scott on the fifty-fourth ballot.  

The party was split on slavery, particularly the issue of enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act.  The Party platform endorsed enforcement over Scott’s objection leading to loss of support of the Whig ticket in New England, and disillusion with the candidate among pro-slavery Southerners who jumped en-mass to the Democrats.  Despite his personal popularity Scott carried only four states.  It was also the last hurrah of the shattered Whigs as a national party.  

Scott, his vanity bruised, none-the-less went back to work as Commanding General.  

It is fortunate for Lincoln and the Union that he stayed as long as he did.  But after McDowell’s raw and ill trained volunteer army was routed at First Bull Run, Lincoln had to turn to the ambitious Democrat George McClellan as his field commander.  McClellan, popular with the troops and with the press, was openly insubordinate to the Commanding General and plotted to replace him.  Seeing the writing on the wall and in ill health, Scott finally retired in November.  McClellan got his job while retaining field command.  

In the classic but wildly inaccurate Warner Bros. Custer bio-pic They Died with their Boots On Sydney Greenstreet portrayed Winfield Scott still in command deep into the Civil War, seen here listening to an appeal from Olivia de Haviland as loyal Libby Custer.

McClellan would be just as insubordinate to the President as he was to Scott and despite assembling a massive, well trained, and well-appointed Army proved too timid.  Lincoln replaced him as Commanding General with General Henry “Old Brains” Halleck, a plodding administrator who did not get in the way of the field commanders like Grant and Sherman who could actually win battles.

Winfield Scott, Old Fuss and Feathers, as he was known by his men, died at West Point in 1866.

  

Reconsidering Lincoln—Was he a Liberator or Racist? Part 3

 

 

Personal tragedy and four years of the burdens of war visibly aged Abraham Lincoln as shown in his final portrait taken by Alexander Gardner days before his death.

Note—We finally take up the story Lincoln and race when he was elected President of the United States.  In this conclusion he faces his immediate crisis, and we examine how he used issues of race and slavery to advance he proclaimed war objective of preserving the Union and how his views evolved. 

If Abraham Lincoln held any real hope that his pledges not to interfere with slavery in states where it was established and his protestations of racial loyalty would mollify the South, he was quickly disabused of the notion.  Before he took the oath of office the seven states seceded and the Confederacy was formed on February 8, 1861 with seven states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.  They elected Jefferson Davis president and established a capitol at Mobile, Alabama. 

The New York Times was one of the newspapers that mocked Lincoln for "sneaking" through Baltimore while changing trains to Washington when he was threatened by mobs and Alan Pinkerton suspected a assignation plot. He was variously described as disguising himself as a Scotsman or a woman.

Even after having to sneak through Baltimore to avoid secessionist mobs Lincoln still tried to extend gestures of peace to the South in his First Inaugural Address: 

Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so”… We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies ... The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. 
 

But it was futile.  Lincoln pledged to protect the Union.    War finally broke out when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumpter in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina on April 12, 1861.  From the beginning, Lincoln insisted that his only war aim was the preservation of the Union and tried to downplay the issue of slavery.  More states joined the rebellion—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.  Border states Kentucky and Missouri attempted to establish Confederate governments, but the states officially remained in the Union despite fighting.  Slave-holding Delaware and Maryland were kept in the Union mainly by virtual occupation, although Maryland would go on to provide substantial numbers of troops to the North.  Unionist western counties seceded from the Old Dominion and were admitted to the Union as the new state of West Virginia. 

Hopes for a quick war and “home by Christmas” were quickly dashed by a series of Confederate victories and Union disasters.  With the war dragging on members of his Cabinet especially Secretary of State William Seward and Radical Republicans in Congress began to press for direct action on slavery.  Lincoln wrote to Horace Greely: 

By 1862 he would put that assertion to the test.  With the war dragging on and casualties mounting horrifically, he began to view abolition of slavery in the rebellious states as both an attack on the economic foundation of Southern society and a potential rallying cause for war weary Northerners.  Slaves near front lines were already abandoning their masters’ plantations and flocking to the protection of the Union Army.  Some commanders welcomed them, others declared them contraband of war—property—and put them to labor in construction and transportation gangs.  Lincoln surmised if word got out that they would be freed, more slaves would do the same even away from the lines.  He also began to consider how Blacks could be armed and included in the Army. 

Pro-administration cartoonist Thomas Nast illustrated the Emancipation Proclamation with scenes of jubilant slaves hearing the news.  It became fodder for the creation of the Great Emancipator image.

But to make a move, he felt he had to act after a hard-to-come-by major victory in the field so as not to appear to be acting out of weakness.  The bloody Battle of Antietam, a narrow Union victory even though it failed to smash Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, finally gave him the opportunity he was looking for.  On September 22, 1862, five days after Antietam, Lincoln called his Cabinet into session and issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to go into effect on January 1, 1863.  The Proclamation only covered Southern states and areas under “active rebellion.”  He took the interim to sell the country on his military authority as Commander in Chief to take action and to consolidate support for it.  He also made a case that it gave rebellious states 100 days to end their rebellion and rejoin the Union to preserve their slaves.  Of course, he knew that none would. 

The bloody massacre of Black troops trapped at Ft. Pillow in 1864 by Nathan Bedford Forrest shocked the President and increased his gratitude for the US Colored Troops sacrifices for the Union. 

Thousands of Free Blacks and former slaves were enlisted in the Army as units of the U.S. Colored Troops.  Many fought bravely and with distinction in actions like the doomed assault of Fort Donelson during the Siege of Charleston in 1863 and the Battle of the Crater in 1864.  Lincoln was outraged by the massacre of Black troops captured at Fort Pillow in Tennessee in 1864 by forces under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest who would go on to found the Ku Klux Klan after the war. Other enlistees provided garrison troops behind the lines protecting seized Confederate territory and freeing White regiments for the front lines.  Some were placed in labor battalions and often given dangerous assignments like handling ammunition and powder.  Collectively all were a critical addition to Union forces and earned grudging respect from many White troops. 

Lincoln’s views of Blacks were also evolving through personal contact with Frederick Douglass who visited the Executive Mansion at least twice and other lesser-known individuals who made personal appeals to the President on behalf of loved ones.  In Douglass and other Black leaders, he found intellectual strength and ability that he had previously dismissed.  His human sympathy was aroused by the common Blacks he encountered.  

                                                Mary Lincoln's seamstress, friend and confidant Elizabeth Keckly influenced her and by extension her husband.

But perhaps he was most influenced far closer to home.  Mary, whose mental health was effected by the death of her son Willie and who was beset by critics for her extravagance, was also assumed by many to be a Confederate sympathizer and perhaps even a spy, especially after she brought her half-sister Emily Todd Helm to stay with her in December 1863, after the death of her husband, Confederate General Benjamin Hardin Helm who was killed at the Battle of Chattanooga. Another half-sister, Martha Todd White, of Selma, Alabama, obtained a pass from Lincoln to come through the lines and was accused of smuggling contraband of war on her return trip.  But Mary, who frequently accompanied her husband on field inspections and hospital visits, became increasingly hostile to the Rebels.  She was extremely close to her live-in dressmaker and personal friend Elizabeth Keckly, the Black seamstress who previously served the Jefferson Davis Family. Keckly had Mary’s ear about the injustices, sufferings, and ambitions of her people and spoke to the President as well.  Lincoln also developed friendships with the Mansion’s Black servants especially his personal valet, majordomo, and secret confidant William Slade. 

Mary Lincoln opened discrete communications between the President and his vocal Radical Republican opponents like Senator Charles Sumner, seen above, and Congressman Thaddeas Stevens.

Mary also came under the personal sway of arch-abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.   Lincoln was often beset and frustrated by criticism for moving too slowly against slavery and attempted interference with his conduct of the war by the New Englander and by the Radical Republican block in the House led by Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens.  Mary privately advanced their arguments to the President and in turn served as bridge to them, according to Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.  Most would modify their hostility to the President after the Emancipation Proclamation. 

Lincoln racism reputation has also been tainted by the 1862 uprising of the Dakota in the ancestral Sioux heartland of Minnesota and Dakota Territory.  The uprising took settlers across Minnesota by surprise with dozens of farmsteads attacked, burned, and their residents killed.  Established towns like New Ulm were attacked and settlers fled in a panic toward the safety of St. Paul.  Most of the Minnesota Militia were Federalized and Volunteer Regiments which were occupied many fit and able military age men and posted them front lines.   The president considered the native uprising a stab in the back to the greater war effort and had to contemplate diverting forces to meet the threat. 

His attitude was also shaped by his past as a militia volunteer during the Black Hawk War of 1836.  Although New Salem was safe and far south of the action in northwestern Illinois and southern Wisconsin and he never participated in any fighting during his two one-month enlistments, he saw refugees in Wisconsin and other signs of attacks on settlers.  He shared the common attitude that Native Americans should be expelled from areas of White settlement or where Whites wanted to settle. 

The mass hanging of 38 chiefs and warriors after the 1862 Great Dakota Uprising in Minnesota was laid at Lincoln feet.

Within a few weeks a hastily assembled rag-tag force of the few remaining trained Minnesota Militia, raw recruits, and a handful of Federal garrison troops and eventually members of the 3rd Minnesota Infantry Regiment from the front finally put down the uprising capturing many warriors and villages and sending other fleeing to the Dakota frontier and ultimately to Canada.   

On September 27, 1862, Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley ordered the creation of a military commission to conduct trials of captured Dakota warriors.  It was highly irregular and conducted outside both civil and military courts.  The hasty trial was conducted amid highly inflamed public opinion by officers who had been engaged in the conflict.  The Commission announced that 303 prisoners were convicted of murder and rape and were sentenced to death.  Lincoln requested details of the cases and asked if any might be less culpable than others.  Amid both demands for revenge and some pleas for leniency the President commuted the death sentences of 264 prisoners, but he allowed the execution of 39 men. On December 23, he suspended the execution of one of the condemned men after Sibley telegraphed that new information led him to doubt the prisoner’s guilt.  The number of condemned men was reduced to the final 38.  

A mass hanging was held on December 26 at Mankato, Minnesota.  It was the largest one-day mass execution in American history. Congress abolished the eastern Dakota and Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) reservations in Minnesota and declared their treaties null and void. In May 1863, the eastern Dakota and Ho-chunk imprisoned at Fort Snelling at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers were exiled from Minnesota. 

Despite whatever mercy Lincoln showed in his commutations, Native Americans still hold him responsible for the execution atrocity and the cultural devastation of the Dakota and Ho-Chunk including the exile of many non-combatants, opponents of the uprising, and even allies who had provided intelligence cooperation to the troops. 

Still, for Lincoln the uprising and its aftermath were a blip compared to the much greater struggle to which he again rapidly turned his full attention. 

As the war drew to a close, Lincolns professed attitudes about Blacks and their future evolved.   

No where was that more evident than in Lincoln’s drive to get the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery across the United States in loyal Border States as well as the secessionist Confederacy.   Backed by Radical Republicans it had passed the Senate where no rebellious states were represented but narrowly was defeated in the House by Border State Representatives and united Democratic opposition in early 1864.  Lincoln’s reelection victory in November after he made abolition by Constitutional Amendment the center piece of his campaign along with Republican Congressional victories were characterized as popular mandates for final action. 

It would still be an uphill battle and would require the votes of a handful of wavering Republicans, at least some Democrats, and a somewhat uneasy alliance with his former harsh critics among the Radical Republicans.  Lincoln determined that the best chance for passage would come during the lame duck session of Congress when the votes of some retiring or defeated incumbents who had nothing to lose might be swayed.   

Lincoln wrote to Congress in his December 6, 1864 State of the Union Address, “there is only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States for their action. And as it is to so go, at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better?” 

The passage of the 13th Amendment by the lame duck Congress in 1865 was charactarized as an early Valentine to the President.

He instructed Secretary of State William H. Seward, Representative John B. Alley, and others to procure votes by any means necessary, and they promised government posts and campaign contributions to outgoing Democrats willing to switch sides.  Seward had a large fund for direct bribes. Ashley, who reintroduced the measure into the House, also lobbied several Democrats to vote in favor of the measure.  Thaddeus Stevens later commented that ‘the greatest measure of the Nineteenth Century was passed by corruption aided and abetted by the purest man in America.” 

On January 31, 1865, the House called another vote on the amendment, with neither side being certain of the outcome. With a total of 183 House members—one seat was vacant—122 needed to vote aye to secure passage. Eight Democrats abstained—many of them bribed to do so—reduced the number to 117. Every Republican (84), Independent Republican (2), and Unconditional Unionist (16) supported the measure, as well as fourteen Democrats, almost all of them lame ducks, and three Unionists. The amendment finally passed by a vote of 119 to 56, narrowly reaching the required two-thirds majority. The House exploded into celebration, with some members openly weeping. Black onlookers, who had only been allowed to attend Congressional sessions since the previous year, cheered from the galleries. 

It was an exhausting political master stroke by Lincoln as the war was driving to a close.  Ratification by the States moved with astounding speed.  By the end of February, 18 states had ratified the amendment. Among them were the ex-Confederate states of Virginia and Louisiana, where ratifications were submitted by Reconstruction governments.  On December 18, 1865, Secretary of State Seward certified that the 13th Amendment had become valid as a part of the Constitution. 

By that time Lincoln was dead. 

Lincoln accompanied by his son Tad entered the former Confederate Capital of Richmond to the cheers and adulation of freed slaves.

On April 4, 1865, two days after Confederate forces evacuated Richmond, Lincoln and his son Tad visited the still smoldering ruins of the South’s former Capitol. As they stepped ashore, they were instantly recognized by the former slaves, who surrounded them weeping and cheering, declaring him a Liberator and a savior.  He was deeply moved. 

With that fresh in his mind the President publicly foresaw for the first time a future in which some Black men could enjoy citizenship rights. In his last public speech on April 11, 1865, just two days after Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, Lincoln saw an opportunity to present a case to the public. 

As he described the work of 12,000 Louisianans loyal to the Union who had abolished slavery within the state, Lincoln, for the first time by any President, publicly stated that he favored giving at least some Black men, including the “very intelligent and...those who serve our cause as soldiers” the right to vote. His public endorsement of limited black suffrage prompted John Wilkes Booth, who stood watching from the crowd, to declare “that is the last speech he will ever make.” Three days later, on April 14, 1865, Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, fatally wounding the 16th President of the United States. 

Lincoln gave his last speech from a second floor window of the Executive Mansion to a crowd of wildly celebrating citizens on April 11.  John Wilkes Booth, pictured in a cape at left listened and vowed revenge on the President and the administration for considering granting limited voting rights to some Blacks.

Lincoln’s death left the scope and details of Reconstruction up in the air.  He approved of General Ulysses S. Grant’s lenient parole of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.  He foresaw a soft Reconstruction with former Confederates who swore loyalty to the Union quickly resorted to full citizenship rights and states quickly re-admitted—or recognized since in his view they never had the right to secede at all.  He doesn’t seem to have given much thought about how that would affect the newly freed slaves.  He still vaguely supported resettlement in Africa but had probably abandoned in real hope that could be accomplished. 

Radical Republicans supported the use of occupying Federal troops to protect liberated slaves, their right to vote, and the governments they helped to form.  Lincoln would probably have pursued a much softer Reconstruction that would have allowed former Rebels more quickly over turn the gains of Freedmen. 

Despite this the Radical Republicans who had once scorned him immediately raised the slain President to the status of a pure and holy martyr and used that to push for their sweeping Reconstruction reforms and military protection for freed slaves and Reconstruction governments against the resistance of President Andrew Johnson.  Although Johnson narrowly escaped their impeachment trial, the Radicals were able to extend Federal Protection for several years. 

Assessing Lincoln’s whole legacy on race is still controversial.  Opinions range from the wholly condemnational to vestiges of the Great Emancipator image. 

                                                 Black Harvard Historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. edited this important assessment Lincoln on Race & Slavery.

We will leave this examination with words by honored Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: 

Whereas abolition was a central aspect of Lincoln’s moral compass, racial equality was not …Lincoln despised slavery as an institution, an economic institution that discriminated against white men who couldn’t afford to own slaves and, thus, could not profit from the advantage in the marketplace that slaves provided. At the same time, however, he was deeply ambivalent about the status of black people vis-à-vis white people, having fundamental doubts about their innate intelligence and their capacity to fight nobly with guns against white men in the initial years of the Civil War… [Lincoln] certainly embraced anti-black attitudes and phobias in his early years and throughout his debates with Douglas in the 1858 Senate race… By the end of the Civil War, Lincoln was on an upward arc, perhaps heading toward becoming the man he has since been mythologized as being: the Great Emancipator, the man who freed — and loved — the slaves. But his journey was certainly not complete on the day that he died. Abraham Lincoln wrestled with race until the end.