December 8, 1863—With victories secured in the Eastern and Western theaters, President Abraham Lincoln looked beyond the Civil War in his annual message to Congress toward reuniting the Union and making it more prosperous—first by offering generous amnesty terms to Confederates, then, in a less-noticed passage, by urging the nation’s legislative body to encourage immigration.
“I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” Lincoln once wrote—and, particularly since David Herbert Donald’s biography a dozen years ago, it’s become something of a fashion to accept this version of his Presidency as a grand improvisation.
There is a core of truth to this interpretation of his career, to be sure. Lincoln did not know, any more than any other President does, all the twists and turns that a war can take—all the unexpected reversals, all the victories practically dropped in one’s lap, all the contingencies an executive faces at the moment of decision that posterity, for all its access to how the conflict turns out, conveniently doesn’t see.
But there’s another way to look at his career—one resembling, in its way, Charles Dickens’ method of creating his novels. The serial publication of the latter works has led people to conclude that Dickens crafted his books almost entirely on the fly. In fact, as time went on, the British novelist consciously planned well before he put pen to paper how his books would proceed—he would use the period between publication more on how to adjust his plot rather than completing changing his ending.
Shifting Tactics, Constant Strategy
Similarly, Lincoln was adjusting legislative tactics without losing sight of the overall war strategy: in the words of Daniel Webster years before, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”
Lincoln had even put aside an idea he’d floated in his message to Congress the year before: colonization of freed slaves (who, he believed, would never be able to adjust to a profoundly racist society). Moreover, the exigencies of war now promised to put more and more territory within Union grasp, and with it questions of what to do with hundreds of thousands of former slaves and of how to re-integrate former rebels back within the Union. The two questions were, in fact, not exclusive of each other.
Lincoln’s first objective with the “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction” he attached to his annual message was to further undercut support for the Confederacy. He had already taken a step in this direction by admitting West Virginia to the Union—ironically enough, by allowing it to secede from Virginia.
Destroying the Confederacy Through the “10 Percent Plan”
For a long time in the last century, the school of historians who regarded Reconstruction as a “tragic era” focused on the difference between Lincoln, a so-called “moderate,” and the allegedly more “Radical Republicans.” Crucial to their presentation was Lincoln’s original plan for readmitting individuals and states to the Union. Overwhelmingly, it allows these historians to paint it as of a piece with his vow in the Second Inaugural Address: “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”
But there’s another way to view this: as a wartime measure—specifically, as a cunning means of strangling the government of Jefferson Davis. If 10% of voters in a state that seceded took an oath of allegiance to the Union, he would pardon all individuals involved (except for high-ranking officials), and they could begin to form a new government.
Think of it this way: The more states Lincoln could put out of the Confederate column by such means, the fewer soldiers it promised Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.
Individuals who took this oath of allegiance, Lincoln promised, would enjoy “restoration of all rights of property.” It was the following phrase that was the single non-negotiable part of what came to be called the “Ten Percent Plan”: “except as to slaves.” That four-word phrase formed the heart of the free-soil coalition that had created the Republican Party in the first place.
But the destruction of slavery included in the proclamation was by no means insignificant. It called for entirely remaking labor relations in the South. It would put an end to the conspiracy conducted, in Lincoln’s view, at the highest levels of the federal government—in the Buchanan White House and the Supreme Court, through the Dred Scott decision—to maintain a system he regarded as fundamentally inhumane.
As Lincoln would show through the end of the war, in the Thirteenth Amendment that outlawed slavery throughout the United States, there was no going back on that point. He had hoped, at the start of the war, to put slavery on the road to extinction simply by blocking access to new western lands that landowners wanted because of cotton-depleted soil in the old South.
His willingness to let slavery stand in the states where it currently existed—to let it die of its own accord, if you will—was deemed insufficient by secessionists, so Lincoln was forced to push emancipation as a wartime necessity. So be it, he decided: if the end of slavery had to come, then, let the hateful system die sooner rather than later.
Ending Labor Shortages in the West Through Immigration
As he looked to tie the South back into the Union, Lincoln contemplated means of solidifying it in the West. What he noticed, even amid the daily telegraph dispatches reporting on the war’s progress, were reports from the territorial governors of Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, New Mexico, and Arizona that their “mineral resources” were “proving far richer than has been heretofore understood,” he noted in his 1863 address to Congress. At the same time, immigration from abroad had slowed during the war.
How to extract these riches? To Lincoln, the means seemed self-evident: foreigners were clamoring at their consulates for permission to emigrate to the U.S., even as not even labor existed at the moment to obtain gold and silver, as well as to farm the land. Therefore, “I again submit to your consideration the expediency of establishing a system for the encouragement of immigration.”
This part of Lincoln’s address has been largely ignored. In fact, my copy of Lincoln’s Selected Speeches and Writings from the Library of America does not include this section of the message.
“I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” Lincoln once wrote—and, particularly since David Herbert Donald’s biography a dozen years ago, it’s become something of a fashion to accept this version of his Presidency as a grand improvisation.
There is a core of truth to this interpretation of his career, to be sure. Lincoln did not know, any more than any other President does, all the twists and turns that a war can take—all the unexpected reversals, all the victories practically dropped in one’s lap, all the contingencies an executive faces at the moment of decision that posterity, for all its access to how the conflict turns out, conveniently doesn’t see.
But there’s another way to look at his career—one resembling, in its way, Charles Dickens’ method of creating his novels. The serial publication of the latter works has led people to conclude that Dickens crafted his books almost entirely on the fly. In fact, as time went on, the British novelist consciously planned well before he put pen to paper how his books would proceed—he would use the period between publication more on how to adjust his plot rather than completing changing his ending.
Shifting Tactics, Constant Strategy
Similarly, Lincoln was adjusting legislative tactics without losing sight of the overall war strategy: in the words of Daniel Webster years before, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”
Lincoln had even put aside an idea he’d floated in his message to Congress the year before: colonization of freed slaves (who, he believed, would never be able to adjust to a profoundly racist society). Moreover, the exigencies of war now promised to put more and more territory within Union grasp, and with it questions of what to do with hundreds of thousands of former slaves and of how to re-integrate former rebels back within the Union. The two questions were, in fact, not exclusive of each other.
Lincoln’s first objective with the “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction” he attached to his annual message was to further undercut support for the Confederacy. He had already taken a step in this direction by admitting West Virginia to the Union—ironically enough, by allowing it to secede from Virginia.
Destroying the Confederacy Through the “10 Percent Plan”
For a long time in the last century, the school of historians who regarded Reconstruction as a “tragic era” focused on the difference between Lincoln, a so-called “moderate,” and the allegedly more “Radical Republicans.” Crucial to their presentation was Lincoln’s original plan for readmitting individuals and states to the Union. Overwhelmingly, it allows these historians to paint it as of a piece with his vow in the Second Inaugural Address: “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”
But there’s another way to view this: as a wartime measure—specifically, as a cunning means of strangling the government of Jefferson Davis. If 10% of voters in a state that seceded took an oath of allegiance to the Union, he would pardon all individuals involved (except for high-ranking officials), and they could begin to form a new government.
Think of it this way: The more states Lincoln could put out of the Confederate column by such means, the fewer soldiers it promised Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.
Individuals who took this oath of allegiance, Lincoln promised, would enjoy “restoration of all rights of property.” It was the following phrase that was the single non-negotiable part of what came to be called the “Ten Percent Plan”: “except as to slaves.” That four-word phrase formed the heart of the free-soil coalition that had created the Republican Party in the first place.
But the destruction of slavery included in the proclamation was by no means insignificant. It called for entirely remaking labor relations in the South. It would put an end to the conspiracy conducted, in Lincoln’s view, at the highest levels of the federal government—in the Buchanan White House and the Supreme Court, through the Dred Scott decision—to maintain a system he regarded as fundamentally inhumane.
As Lincoln would show through the end of the war, in the Thirteenth Amendment that outlawed slavery throughout the United States, there was no going back on that point. He had hoped, at the start of the war, to put slavery on the road to extinction simply by blocking access to new western lands that landowners wanted because of cotton-depleted soil in the old South.
His willingness to let slavery stand in the states where it currently existed—to let it die of its own accord, if you will—was deemed insufficient by secessionists, so Lincoln was forced to push emancipation as a wartime necessity. So be it, he decided: if the end of slavery had to come, then, let the hateful system die sooner rather than later.
Ending Labor Shortages in the West Through Immigration
As he looked to tie the South back into the Union, Lincoln contemplated means of solidifying it in the West. What he noticed, even amid the daily telegraph dispatches reporting on the war’s progress, were reports from the territorial governors of Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, New Mexico, and Arizona that their “mineral resources” were “proving far richer than has been heretofore understood,” he noted in his 1863 address to Congress. At the same time, immigration from abroad had slowed during the war.
How to extract these riches? To Lincoln, the means seemed self-evident: foreigners were clamoring at their consulates for permission to emigrate to the U.S., even as not even labor existed at the moment to obtain gold and silver, as well as to farm the land. Therefore, “I again submit to your consideration the expediency of establishing a system for the encouragement of immigration.”
This part of Lincoln’s address has been largely ignored. In fact, my copy of Lincoln’s Selected Speeches and Writings from the Library of America does not include this section of the message.
It’s understandable that historians have wanted to concentrate on the part of the speech to which the President gave more space: his plan for reconstruction. After all, his assassination left an unfinished legacy of unequal rights for blacks that would not be redressed until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.
But in its way, Lincoln’s comments on immigration were equally revolutionary and visionary. Even in 2008, seeing immigration as a “source of national wealth and strength,” as Lincoln did in his message to Congress, is hardly a settled issue, especially (but not exclusively) within the party of Lincoln itself.
In one way, the economic tsunami that swept the United States and undid the McCain candidacy this past September saved the rank and file of the Republican Party from fully confronting its own folly in pressing for measures such as a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
George W. Bush has not been credited with many brains (with justifiable reason), but even he understood this: he couldn’t eke out narrow victories without securing the Hispanic vote. And so it proved in 2004, when his increased share in this voting bloc helped to counteract gains that Democrats made among the same group through increased registration, according to an analysis by National Review.
The immigration reform bill in the last Congress opened up divisions in the GOP that would undoubtedly have contributed to a defeat in the Presidential race this past fall.
Navigating Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Amid Coalition-Building
Even in the 19th century, Lincoln had struggled with the same tensions of coalition-building that his political descendants did in the 21st century. “How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” he wrote his friend Joshua Speed in 1855, going on to declare that when the nativist Know-Nothings get control, they would say, “All men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’” At that point, he said, he’d prefer going to a country like Russia, “where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.” (The more things change…)
Two years later, in July 1858, after speaking of the descendants of the Founding Fathers, Lincoln turned to immigrants, finding in the Declaration of Independence a text that gave them commonality with native-born Americans:
"..but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,' and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as through they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, (loud and long continued applause) and so they are.
But in its way, Lincoln’s comments on immigration were equally revolutionary and visionary. Even in 2008, seeing immigration as a “source of national wealth and strength,” as Lincoln did in his message to Congress, is hardly a settled issue, especially (but not exclusively) within the party of Lincoln itself.
In one way, the economic tsunami that swept the United States and undid the McCain candidacy this past September saved the rank and file of the Republican Party from fully confronting its own folly in pressing for measures such as a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
George W. Bush has not been credited with many brains (with justifiable reason), but even he understood this: he couldn’t eke out narrow victories without securing the Hispanic vote. And so it proved in 2004, when his increased share in this voting bloc helped to counteract gains that Democrats made among the same group through increased registration, according to an analysis by National Review.
The immigration reform bill in the last Congress opened up divisions in the GOP that would undoubtedly have contributed to a defeat in the Presidential race this past fall.
Navigating Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Amid Coalition-Building
Even in the 19th century, Lincoln had struggled with the same tensions of coalition-building that his political descendants did in the 21st century. “How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” he wrote his friend Joshua Speed in 1855, going on to declare that when the nativist Know-Nothings get control, they would say, “All men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’” At that point, he said, he’d prefer going to a country like Russia, “where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.” (The more things change…)
Two years later, in July 1858, after speaking of the descendants of the Founding Fathers, Lincoln turned to immigrants, finding in the Declaration of Independence a text that gave them commonality with native-born Americans:
"..but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,' and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as through they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, (loud and long continued applause) and so they are.
That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. [Applause.]"
Yet to keep the fractious GOP together, Lincoln did not denounce the Know-Nothings who formed part of the Republican Party at that point. In the 1860 campaign, he denied a Democratic claim that he’d entered a Know Nothing gathering, but warned a Jewish friend about publicizing this point further: “Our adversaries think they can gain a point, if they could force me to openly deny this charge, by which some degree of offence would be given to the Americans [Know-Nothings]. For this reason, it must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the charge.”
The Contract Labor Law: Passage and Repeal
By 1863, however, the attention of the country, including the Know-Nothings, was riveted on slavery and the peril to the Union. It was this moment that Lincoln chose for his immigration initiative. And, believe it or not, Congress was amenable to the idea: The following year, it passed the Contract Labor Law, allowing employers to:
* recruit immigrants from abroad;
* pay transportation costs;
* require immigrants to work up to a year to repay these expenses--making them, in effect, indentured.
For one of the great domestic initiatives—one of the few—enacted under this quintessential wartime President, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the Contract Labor Act enabled employers to import 5,000 laborers from China.
The problem became, however, that the laborers imported became strikebreakers—something that Lincoln undoubtedly did not foresee. The Contract Labor Law was repealed only four years after its original passage, and a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment—especially directed against Chinese laborers—began in earnest.
In recent years, I’ve speculated about what Lincoln’s domestic agenda would have been like if he’d been able to become a peace President in his second term. I think elements of the “American System” advocated by his hero Henry Clay—domestic improvements such as the transcontinental railroad—would have been one element of it.
But another would have involved a stronger country with all reading from the same founding text: the Declaration of Independence.
Lincoln’s attitude toward African-American slaves and immigrant workers was founded on the same principle: work done by the sweat of the brow made all men equal with him and with each other.
But he put it far more memorably in his second message to Congress the year before: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.”
No comments:
Post a Comment