April 11 the President issued a proclamation closing Southern ports. Any ship or vessel from beyond the United States trying to enter these ports with articles subject to duties, “the same, together with its tackle, apparel, furniture and cargo, shall be forfeited to the United States.”
Also of this date was a proclamation barring from all U.S. ports the war vessels of any foreign country whose ports refused equal privileges and immunities to U.S. war vessels. The home war fading, the Union could risk challenging other countries.
The President spent his best working hours this day on his speech for the evening. He was seizing the initiative to set in motion his own reconstruction program. Not until next December would Congress meet, not unless he called a special session. He intended to speak to the country so plainly that before Congress met, he could hope the majority of the people would be with him.
A loose, informal, nameless aggregate of political power was responsive to him, with common understandings; he was their voice for remolding Southern society and politics toward peaceful resumption of their place as states in the old Union. He knew his American people. Panic, want, fanaticism, race hatred, cries for retribution, lust for big money and fortunes, these were spread over the country. Lincoln had his choice of going with those who, to win a complete and abstract justice for the Negro, would not hesitate about making the South a vast graveyard of slaughtered whites, with Negro state governments established and upheld by Northern white bayonets. The caldron of war hate still boiled under the surface rejoicing of April 10 over Appomattox. The passions of Sumner, Wade and others had become a habit with them and their followers.
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A “carefully written paper” rather than a speech the President held in waiting for the crowd. With bands of music and banners of freedom, with shouting and hoorah, an immense throng poured into the area in front of the White House. Many were the surging calls and cries for the President. “There was something terrible,” thought Noah Brooks, “in the enthusiasm with which the beloved Chief Magistrate was received. Cheers upon cheers, wave after wave of applause, rolled up, the President patiently standing quiet until it was all over.”
He began to read his speech holding a candle in his left hand and the manuscript in the right. “Speedily becoming embarrassed with the difficulty of managing the candle and the speech,” wrote Brooks, “he made a comical motion with his left foot and elbow, which I construed to mean that I should hold his candle for him, which I did.” Then, “We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart ... A call for a national thanksgiving is being prepared, and will be duly promulgated ... To Gen. Grant, his skilful officers, and brave men, all belongs. The gallant Navy stood ready, but was not in reach to take active part.”
This to the crowd was in somewhat the expected tone. Then the key changed. The crowd was “perhaps surprised,” thought Brooks. The President read on, dropped to the floor each written page when read, and became aware that Tad was picking them up as they dropped. He could hear Tad, unseen to the crowd, calling for “another” and “another” of the fluttering sheets. He read on: “By these recent successes the re-inauguration of the national authority—reconstruction—which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We must simply begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements.”
I hose of the crowd who had come for hoorah wondered how much more of it there would be. It was a little heavy, it seemed. Others knew he was talking not to the thousands on the White House lawn but to the whole American and European world.
I hree years he had been studying what to do about getting Louisiana properly back into the Union. “From about July 1862, I had corresponded with different persons, supposed to be interested, in seeking a reconstruction of a State government for Louisiana. When the Message of 1863, with the plan before mentioned, reached New-Orleans, Gen. Banks wrote me that he was confident the people, with his military co-operation, would reconstruct, substantially on that plan. I wrote him, and some of them to try it; they tried
it, and the result is known. Such only has been my agency in getting up the Louisiana government. As to sustaining it, my promise is out, as before stated. But, as bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall treat this as a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest. But I have not yet been so convinced.”
Off to the discard he was throwing those labored legal arguments in Congress that the seceded states through the act of secession had “committed suicide” and thereby were no longer states. “Good for nothing at all,” he held this question. “A merely pernicious abstraction.” He would offer this reasoning: “We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation . . .
“The amount of constituency, so to speak, on which the new Louisiana government rests, would be more satisfactory to all, if it contained fifty, thirty, or even twenty thousand, instead of only about twelve thousand, as it does. It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers. Still the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable. The question is ‘Will it be wiser to take it as it is, and help to improve it; or to reject, and disperse it?’ ‘Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining, or by discarding her new State Government?’
“Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave-state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the State, held elections, organized a State government, adopted a freestate constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons are thus fully committed to the Union, and to perpetuate freedom in the state—committed to the very things, and nearly all the things the nation wants—and they ask the nations recognition, and it’s assistance to make good their committal. Now, if we reject, and spurn them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them.”
He gave his forecast, spoke as a sad prophet: “We in effect say to the white men ‘You are worthless, or worse—we will neither help you, nor be helped by you.’ To the blacks we say ‘This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances
of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how.’ If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have, so far, been unable to perceive it.”
He would turn from these dark visions. “If, on the contrary, we recognize, and sustain the new government of Louisiana the converse of all this is made true. We encourage the hearts, and nerve the arms of the twelve thousand to adhere to their work, and argue for it, and proselyte for it, and fight for it, and feed it, and grow it, and ripen it to a complete success. The colored man too, in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps toward it, than by running backward over them? Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.”
He came to his closing words. “Important principles may, and must, be inflexible. In the present ‘situation as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.”
As he stood for a moment taking the plaudits of the crowd, he smiled to the candle-bearer Brooks. “That was a pretty fair speech, I think, but you threw some light on it.”
There were applause and cheers, with no such uproar as had begun the evening. The speech had been too long, too closely reasoned, to please a big crowd. He would hear from the country about the speech. What he heard would help guide him further. His powers were vast. Before Congress met in December he might put through a series of decisions and actions that would channel and canal future policy lor years, in accord with his outspoken designs of this evening.
The New York Tribune reported the speech “fell dead, wholly without effect on the audience, and furthermore, “it caused a great disappointment and left a painful impression.” Other newspapers noted frequent applause and “silent attention" between the punctuations of applause.
On the calendars the day of April 11 was marked off. Midnight came. The lighted windows of the White House had darkened. The curves of light shining from the Capitol dome were gone. The moist air stayed on. Washington slept in the possession of a mist that crept everywhere, finespun, intangible, elusive.
CHAPTER XLVIII