Democrats represented four northerners out of ten and with white southerners included very likely a majority of American voters. United, they could deny the majority of the two-thirds vote needed, and they could make a plausible case against action at that time. They could protest that the amendment process had unspoken limits (a premise that even some Republicans admitted). Any change strengthening the central government’s power at the expense of the state, or destroying the one institution that had most defined southern society, subverted the people’s charter that the Founders had intended. They pronounced slavery so obviously dying that it needed no constitutional executioner. Several pointed out that no constitutional majority could pass the amendment because with twenty-two southern senators and eleven states’ representatives absent, Congress had no such majority. Many voices reminded the nation that making emancipation irreversible might prolong the war and reinvigorate Confederates’ will to fight. A dwindling few even tried to show that slavery was natural, right, and necessary, when two incompatible races had to live together.²

The president made personal solicitations. His most conservative friends, like recently dismissed Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, made pragmatic appeals. A shadowy lobby that Secretary of State William Seward assembled offered more tangible rewards. Still, the opposition’s ranks nearly held. Nearly was not good enough. The resolution passed 119 to 56, thanks to ten Democratic converts and eight more conveniently absent. A “perfect snow-storm” of white handkerchiefs waved in the galleries as the final vote was announced, and the hall exploded into cheering. “Some embraced one another, others wept like children,” wrote the austere congressman and lifetime abolitionist George W. Julian of Indiana. “I have felt, ever since the vote, as if I were in a new country.” The Thirteenth Amendment won a speedy ratification. Within a fortnight, fifteen states had rushed it through, generally with lopsided majorities. Just three Union states held back in the end. “Liberty is the law of the land,” the Chicago Tribune summed up. “Liberty will end what loyalty began.”³

Those words need emphasis, taking the amendment as a culmination of rather than the first step in a journey toward full equality. Democrats, of course, saw differently. One great change, they had warned, would require others. An amendment stripping the states of their power over a defining domestic institution would breed others, a whole nest-full of cockatrice’s eggs. The public must expect to have “Sambo for breakfast, Sambo for dinner, and Sambo for supper, through a course of years,” one editor wrote. Republicans would fiddle with the Constitution to give southern blacks the vote or to force Chinamen, Malays, and South Sea islanders into the electorate—or far, far worse: “Immediately behind the negro . . . stands the woman,” the Cincinnati Enquirer warned.⁴

On the opposite extreme, radical Republicans and abolitionists hoped for more than a bare freedom in law. In the amendment’s second provision, giving Congress the power to pass appropriate legislation, they saw the authority to end the myriad discriminations that the law placed on free blacks, and not just in the slave South. In Julian’s own Indiana, the law forbade blacks’ entry into the state and barred them from juries and public schools. Outside of New England, they could nowhere vote on the same terms as whites. In fact, not counting those meeting New York’s property qualification, they could not vote at all. Northern law had none of the comprehensiveness or severity of even the most lenient southern code, and abolitionists and black petitioners had helped wipe out some of the worst restrictions before the war. With emancipation, the pace of change had quickened. Thanks to the Lincoln administration, America had recognized the black nations of Haiti and Liberia and repealed the Fugitive Slave Law. For the first time, a nonwhite attorney had been admitted to practice before the Supreme Court. Thanks in part to the earnest endeavors of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, one of the earliest members of an antislavery party to come to the Senate, Lincoln had appointed as chief justice one that had arrived there earlier still. Former secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase now wore the robes that once had draped the sagging shoulders of Roger Brooke Taney, the jurist who in the 1857 Dred Scott decision had denied that any black could become a U.S. citizen. In words that Pennsylvania’s radical congressman Thaddeus Stevens said would doom him to everlasting fame “and, I fear, everlasting fire,” he opined that the country’s history taught that the black man had no rights that the white man was bound to respect.⁵ It had never been wholly true, but even now, it remained truer than the Sumners and Julians, the fieldworkers against discrimination like the orator Wendell Phillips, the former slave Frederick Douglass, or woman’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton would like. Blackface minstrel shows delighted audiences with lustful “negresses” and strutting overdressed darkies (white actors, mostly, behind the burnt-cork makeup and underneath the outlandish white gloves) and comforting songs of gay times on the old plantation. Currier and Ives lithographs of “darktown” antics or of slaves capering by their rose-decked cabin door, showed what popular assumptions the struggle for equal rights had to overcome. For all Sumner’s efforts, the law still limited post office jobs to white men. Until the year before, it had paid black soldiers less than white ones.⁶ Black groups and white allies already were mounting campaigns to open Washington and Philadelphia’s streetcar lines to those of all races, others to remove racial restrictions from the witness box, the school laws, and, in Minnesota and Connecticut, the ballot. When Lincoln’s own state wiped out its infamous “Black Laws” that winter, it made a down payment on a debt to equality long since due. “The foundations of the Republic are to be laid anew,” wrote New Hampshire senator Aaron Cragin. “These foundations must be laid broad and deep in the eternal principles of truth. This done, we may look for the favor and blessings of God.”⁷

Later history remembers the radical few, who spoke to what proved to be America’s future; it forgets the conservative many, whose influence and power would confine how far any movement toward equal rights had any chance to go. Too easily, all their constitutional scruples, their unfulfilled fears can get distilled into a code for racism—as it often was. But the real surprise may come among those, hostile to slavery and advocating the amendment, who saw its chief purpose as related to the present, more than to the future. For them, ending slavery would remove the one great cause that had made this terrible conflict and, left alone, might make another. Abolition dealt a final blow to disunion. With its enactment, a Union triumph would usher in “a blessed and enduring peace,” the Kennebec Journal predicted.⁸

The musket had yet to win that peace when thawing winter set General Ulysses S. Grant’s armies in motion again against the Army of Northern Virginia outside Petersburg, but only the blind could fail to glimpse the end in sight. Every day the Army of the Potomac’s strength grew, while Robert E. Lee’s defenders in the trenches dwindled. As both sides waited, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces carried the fight northward from Savannah, a swath of ruin across South Carolina, of lone chimneys where houses had been (“Sherman’s sentinels,” some called them) and rails heated, bent and twisted around trees or telegraph poles (“Sherman’s hairpins”). With cities “daily tumbling like ripe apples,” no Rebel force could even slow them. They took Columbia; 1,300 houses perished in a torrent of flame. Barnwell became “Burn-well.” Wherever the “bummers” marched, slavery dissolved. So did every other institution in the Palmetto State. Lawlessness, anarchy, and roving bands of plunderers, some still clad in Confederate grey, spread into the low rice country along the coasts. Union enclaves along the Atlantic coast widened. Wilmington fell, the last consequential port in enemy hands. Soon Sherman’s army would reach Virginia, and with it, Lee might find himself pinned between two hosts, each greater and better-fed than his own. Then, if not before, would come the end. No half-made, barely implemented plans from Richmond to enlist slaves under the Rebel flag, no negotiated settlement, could long delay the outcome. At Hampton Roads, Lincoln told emissaries from Richmond, his old congressional colleague, vice president Alexander Stephens, among them, that the United States would accept no terms but a complete submission to the laws of the United States. The Confederacy was dying hard, but dying.⁹

It died that the republic that the Founders had made might live: not simply the Union and not a new, consolidated, centralized nation unrecognizable to those white southerners who claimed to have left it four winters since. At first, this assertion sounds like a truism sucked dry of truth. So much had changed, partly because those southern lawmakers that had barred the way could no longer impede the majority will. To pay for the war, a northern-dominated Congress had raised import duties to their highest point ever. The Morrill “War Tariff ” in essence would survive the next half century. A national banking system had given some coherence in place of the hodgepodge of private and state institutions from before the war. Their banknotes passed as good anywhere in the land. A flood of nationally issued paper money, greenbacks, circulated, too, unmoored from their value in gold. Not until 1879 would the United States “resume” exchanging a dollar in gold for a dollar in paper. Excise duties on distilled liquor and tobacco, a federal income tax, and countless small exactions added to the revenue that U.S. bond sales handled through Jay Cooke & Company’s banking house had raised. Across the West, two railroad companies surveyed a route and began grading a line between Council Bluffs, on the Missouri River, and Sacramento. Public money and land grants paid the cost; other transcontinental lines would join them at the Treasury door. The Morrill Land-Grant College Act had applied the national domain to the founding of agricultural schools that would in time become great state universities, open to the poorest, woman or man. The Homestead Act sent an open invitation to would-be farmers of what had once been known as the Great American Desert. If they would settle on 160 acres of public land for five years, it would be theirs, for a ten dollar filing fee. Together, all these measures could have fulfilled the ideals of Jefferson’s republic, with every man an independent landholder, beholden only to nature and the vagaries of season for his livelihood. But they also fostered a more industrial America, rousing itself in commercial might to match its rivals in the markets of the world.¹⁰ Wartime necessity had brought to fulfillment those dreams cherished by Whigs since Henry Clay’s time, of a government committed to make Americans better-off, not just better, and the Jacksonian Democratic commitment to the fullest of opportunity for nature’s noblemen, the producing classes; and both ideals had become finely woven into the Republican Party, that evolving coalition that came out of the 1864 election with a two-thirds majority in both Houses, a president and a Supreme Court leaning its way, and most of the statehouses from Augusta to Sacramento.

For many conservatives, the “farmers’ republic,” the “great white republic” had passed away forever. Lincoln dragged “the bleeding Constitution of the United States behind his chariot as Achilles dragged the dead body of Hector around the walls of Troy.” Democrats pointed to the “densely populated bastilles” that the secretary of state, by a mere tap on a bell, could order to furnish lodging for some unwilling critic of “Abraham Africanus I.” They had seen Union mobs wreck Peace Democratic (“Copperhead”) presses and strew the type in the street, the military arrests in Kentucky and Maryland, the soldiery crowding close to the polls in slave-state elections, the strident pamphleteering of the Union Leagues and other patriotic societies, defining acquiescence as the first duty of a citizen in wartime. Conspirators gathering arms for an uprising against the Republican governments of the Midwest now languished under death sentences, after a military commission had judged their guilt. How could bringing blacks into the free labor force do anything but degrade free white workingmen? How could a government doling its favors out to privileged economic interests do anything but speed democracy’s evolution into a place of elites and commoners? Adapting the fears for free governments’ fragility that every party had used since Sam Adams’s day, they saw in Lincoln a Caesar, in the Julians and Thaddeus Stevenses the Marats of a coming reign of terror, in the freed slaves the savages that impaled white babies and raped their mothers in Santo Domingo some seventy years before. They would turn “a bouillion of babies” into “the fashionable breakfast dish in every household,” or even convert to Mormonism. A few even prayed for a Brutus, and slightly fewer on April 15th rejoiced in secret when the news broke that John Wilkes Booth, who saw himself as exactly that, had killed Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre the night before and escaped, crying, “Sic semper tyrannis”—thus be it ever with tyrants.¹¹

Beyond the Confederate picket lines, the nightmares held an even stronger grip. In their anxious moments, white southerners supped full on the potential horrors of a Union reforged. Slavery would go, but not with any mere, formal freedom to follow. Nature made it impossible that two races could live together as equals. One must perish or one must dominate. The North, having taken the African American’s side, would put that race on top. The gallows’ shadow fell across every southern leader. Where true Unionists came into their own, mass reprisals would begin. Negro uprisings, wholesale land confiscation, military rule, the erasing of state boundaries: any and all seemed possible, as possible as the rumored French fleet, steaming to the Confederacy’s rescue and raining shell down on New York and Washington. The nation would live, but any meaningful republic die. White southerners would be serfs, subjects, slaves before the proud bidding of the North.¹²

Those conjuring these grave new worlds let their dreads father the thought. The Union’s defenders were battling for those things that had made the old republic worth dying for: a nation of laws, not decrees; a country in which the people chose their servants and rulers ruled always by the limits of the Constitution, a central authority supreme in national matters but confined or shut out of those that states could handle on their own; a federation of states equal in rights and privileges and the better for lacking that uniformity in law or custom that consolidated realms imposed. “A republic so vast must have joints,” the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher explained; “if unjointed like a turtle’s back, its weight will break it; if jointed like a lady’s bracelet, it will coil around the wrist of Liberty without danger of breaking.” States’ rights, the great antislavery orator Wendell Phillips agreed, was “the corner-stone of individual liberty.” Scholars had propounded a new idea, that in wartime, necessity allowed a more generous reading of the central government’s constitutional power than in peacetime, but that was just the point: after the combatants had laid down their arms, the Constitution would revert to its normal condition. After America had been reconstructed, the states would resume their just powers. Even South Carolina, the worst offender, would stand in relation to its northern counterparts pretty much as it had stood before.¹³

That desire to return to the way things had been went to the heart of white northerners’ ideal of “Reconstruction.” To reconstruct meant to build again, for some to build anew, but for many others to raise an edifice, with more solid foundations, perhaps, but a distinct resemblance to the structure that had stood before the war. The place of blacks in the new order of things must change, but the essence of a republic, federal and not consolidated, must not. Finally, there was a point so obvious that later generations could overlook it. The one indisputable aim of the war had been to bring the Union together again and, the issue of slavery aside, a Union recognizably li...