Louis P. Masur. Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 247.


 
Anyone who speaks in public about the American Civil War has heard the question, What would Lincoln have done about the reorganization and reestablishment, or reconstruction, of the seceded states in the Union? And behind that question lie others: Were we doomed to have the painful Reconstruction era we endured? Were we destined to abandon the enslaved people of this nation at their moment of freedom? Was it foreordained that the former Confederates would fight back with every weapon at their disposal? Was it possible that the white North would have been more unified and generous? Could we, in short, have been a stronger and better nation if Abraham Lincoln had seen us through the critical years that followed the war? These are good questions, enduring questions. And they are especially compelling questions as we continue the anniversary years of Reconstruction.

The questions about Abraham Lincoln and the possible course of a reconstruction directed by him bear a particular burden. Lincoln, a master of language and eloquence, said relatively little about what he planned to do when the war ended. He had good reasons for his reticence. First, he had to win the war before he could know what would follow. He had only about six months from the time it became clear that the United States would win—and, not coincidentally, from the time he was reelected—until he was assassinated. He had only two days after Lee’s surrender to speak on the subject.

Second, the politics of any plan could hardly have been more complicated. Nearly half of white voters in the North, Democrats all, despised Lincoln and refused to support him even after he led the nation to victory in war. Moreover, large numbers within his own party, from both the left and the right, challenged any plan Lincoln put forward. Third, the people who had been Confederates, who had sacrificed lives, wealth, slavery, pride, and political independence in four years of desperate struggle, would resist any effort to remake their society. Finally, the nation had to find a way to turn people who had been held in perpetual bondage their entire lives into citizens who could determine their own political and civic fate.

These problems stood before anyone who would lead the nation in 1865, even Abraham Lincoln. The challenges were not of his making; in fact, he had done all that anyone could do to minimize the obstacles to reunification and the integration of African Americans into the national polity. That goal had shaped all he did during the war, from start to finish. Lincoln attempted to make it possible for the seceded states to reenter the Union at their first opportunity. He had worked to pass the Thirteenth Amendment even during wartime so that the legal foundations for a new nation without slavery would be in place. He had run with a former Democrat, a Southern Unionist, in 1864 precisely to help start putting the nation back together.

Louis P. Masur helps us understand these challenges, this moment, and Lincoln’s vision in his fine brief book Lincoln’s Last Speech. Masur knows the field well and guides us through the complexities with expert knowledge. The result is a new and necessary perspective on Reconstruction during the sesquicentennial commemoration of these complicated and confusing years.

The scene of Lincoln’s last speech could hardly have been more dramatic. Everyone wanted to hear what the president would say on April 11, 1865, two days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Washington, D.C., was euphoric. Government offices were festooned with large flags, and the State Department displayed a banner large enough to carry a long and celebratory phrase: “the Union saved by faith in the Constitution, faith in the people, and trust in God.” As President Lincoln prepared to give his speech, a “vast throng” gathered all around the White House. Elizabeth Keckly, the African American seamstress to the First Lady, described the people gathered there as “a black, gently swelling sea,” their faces fading “into mere ghostly outlines on the outskirts of the assembly” (5). John Wilkes Booth stood among that sea, in the darkness.

The speech Abraham Lincoln delivered that day was, frankly, not what everyone gathered to hear. A month earlier, he had given the greatest speech by any president—his second inaugural—reflecting on the Civil War and its meaning. The address in April focused instead on the future, on the rebuilding of the country. Instead of evoking a stirring scene for the nation, however, Lincoln spoke about Louisiana and the criticism he had endured on that subject. Just as he had done with the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln advanced particular tasks in prosaic language. He employed the decidedly flat phrase “proper practical relations” six times in the brief speech. Lincoln could not know that this would be his last speech, of course, but he did realize that the nation would soon have to decide how the states in rebellion could come back into the Union.

Louisiana was crucial in the decision-making, for it was the only state in April 1865 that had followed the path Lincoln laid out for state-by-state reconstruction. The plan dictated that a state in rebellion could restore its proper relationship to the federal government when 10 percent of the electorate took an oath of allegiance to the United States, agreed to support emancipation, elected delegates to write a new constitution, and created a new state government. Lincoln never accepted that the seceded states had actually left the Union; he always referred to them as “so-called seceded states.” Though the radicals in his party talked of “conquered territories” or “state suicide,” Lincoln wanted to make it as easy as possible for the southern states to come back into the Union, and that is what his plan attempted.

The April 11 speech marked Lincoln’s first public mention of limited black suffrage, and his support was almost a throwaway line. “I would myself prefer that it were now conferred upon the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers,” he said, as he argued for giving his plan for reconstruction in Louisiana a chance to succeed. That line, we are told, is what inspired John Wilkes Booth to assassinate President Lincoln three days later.

Masur’s book is part of a series on pivotal moments in American history. This speech was pivotal only because it was the last that Abraham Lincoln would deliver. It was not particularly eloquent or influential. But by giving us a sense of what Lincoln was thinking and doing, Masur’s book addresses pivotal questions about a period that was controversial then and has remained so ever since. Lincoln’s last speech is revealing precisely because it was a speech of the moment, a working-through of knotty issues. The speech’s concluding line, and thus Abraham Lincoln’s last public utterance, pointed toward unfinished work rather than great accomplishment: “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” (193). It is Masur’s accomplishment to show the power, significance, and potential behind these relatively prosaic words.

The debates over reconstruction during the war were like a kaleidoscope, shards of ideas and proposals constantly shifting and falling into different patterns. In Masur’s account, which stays close to Lincoln, his advisors, and the Northern press, the main opposition to his vision of reconstruction comes from the radicals. The more profound threat, from the white South, is largely offstage until it barges in under the Johnson administration. White southerners renounced and undercut Reconstruction in every way they could. Would they have behaved differently under Lincoln? Would Lincoln’s actions have been substantially different from Johnson’s? Lincoln had misjudged the southern white majority throughout the war; he kept believing that they must harbor a love for the Union deep within. He may have misjudged them again at war’s end, when they met any leniency with reckless, self-defeating rebellion.

For those who require an answer to the perennial questions about what might have happened had Lincoln lived, Masur offers a wise, Lincoln-like, response: “All that can be said with certainty concerns character, not policy, and Lincoln’s character did not allow politics to become personal.” Although the radicals constantly challenged Lincoln, “he was not given to personal resentments. Neither was he doctrinaire. He recognized there were plans other than his own worth considering, and said so repeatedly. Time and again he changed his mind and altered his position.” Given these traits, Masur argues “there is every reason to believe that after the war he would have moved the nation toward a political reconstruction that did not forsake Southern loyalists, and a social reconstruction that may not have provided the freedmen with all that the radicals envisioned, but would have afforded more by way of government support and protection than Southern blacks ended up receiving” (186).

Frederick Douglass put it beautifully at the end of 1865. Invoking the image of the rail-splitter, Douglass said Lincoln “always used the thin edge of the wedge first and the fact that he used this at all meant that he would if need, use the thick as well as the thin.” Douglass believed that “had Abraham Lincoln been spared to see this day the negro of the south would have more than the hope of enfranchisement and no rebels could hold the reins of government in any one of the late rebellious states.” But now, “[w]hoever else have cause to mourn the loss of Abraham Lincoln, to the colored people of the country his death is an unspeakable calamity” (186–87).

Louis Masur agrees. Had Abraham Lincoln lived, “his humanity might have led the nation toward the righteous peace that he envisioned for all Americans” (187). That seems the best answer we are ever going to have to the unanswerable questions that will always haunt us.