The Reconstruction Wars Begin

On Jan. 26, 1865, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society convened inside Boston’s Melodeon Theater, a mainstay of the city’s cultural, religious and civic life, for its annual meeting. A break from frigid temperatures and heavy snow led to high attendance. The Congregationalist minister Theodore Parker had often offered sermons at the Melodeon. In 1850, the antislavery Parker called for democracy “of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people.” After 30 years of labor, abolitionists now believed that they were in a position to push not only for the final destruction of slavery, but also for a new definition of who made up the “people.” With the bloody Civil War coming to a close, the future of the abolitionist cause, according to the Boston Brahmin Wendell Phillips, was inextricably linked to Reconstruction.

At the Melodeon, Phillips, a Mayflower descendant and Harvard graduate, called for an expansive definition of freedom to take hold as the Union Army made its way to the Confederate capital at Richmond, Va. This included not just emancipation, but also economic independence, equality before the law and the right of suffrage, which was the only way, according to Phillips, to measure the “success or failure” of the Union war effort. Phillips wanted to conquer what his abolitionist friend Sallie Holley once labeled the “atrocious hatred of color.” Phillips was as passionate about suffrage reform as he was about abolition, and he pressured the White House to do more. Let “no negro’s hand drop the bayonet till you have armed it with the ballot,” read a line in a telegram written by Phillips and Frederick Douglass to President Lincoln just a few weeks before.

Not everyone agreed with Phillips’s strategy, though – most notably his friend the publisher William Lloyd Garrison. Although Garrison did not necessarily disagree with Phillips’s long-term commitment to enfranchising millions of former slaves, he did not want to see Phillips put the cart of political reform before the all-important task of ratifying a constitutional amendment ending slavery. Garrison, the editor of the Liberator, the nation’s largest-circulating abolitionist newspaper, was once involved in a wide variety of reform efforts, including temperance and prison reform, but now he was focused exclusively on one issue: the complete eradication of slavery, everywhere and forever.

At the Melodeon, Garrison, a powerful and persuasive orator, talked about the dramatic change in public opinion on the slavery question over the last four years. He believed that this was more than enough ground for celebration. Indeed, there was much to be thankful for in terms of Union victories and the erosion of the ability of the Confederacy to maintain the fight. Three black children from Louisiana, the state most advanced in the reconstruction process, came onstage and sang the melody “Slavery’s Chain is Bound to Break.”

“I choose” to believe, Garrison proclaimed, “that the people have passed the Rubicon, that they have burned the bridge behind them … and never mean to make any further compromise with slavery but do mean to annihilate it.” Garrison hoped that the convention at the Melodeon would be devoted to praising the Lincoln administration’s progress in terms of the antislavery crusade. In the months preceding the convention, Garrison, a man who once shunned politics, had publicly defended Lincoln against abolitionist attacks, especially those leveled by Phillips. However, the majority of those in attendance at the Melodeon were concerned about the president’s commitment to black suffrage and the current reconstruction program in Louisiana.

Garrison and Phillips represented two different theories about reconstruction. For Garrison, who was also the founder of the both the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society, ending slavery by killing what was known as the “Slave Power” made freedom a self-executing reality. Garrison believed that with slavery gone, the natural state of equality before the law would eventually follow, though it would be a struggle and “industrial and educational development” would most likely be needed for the freedmen. Confident that the abolitionist goal had been reached, Garrison proposed that antislavery societies should be dissolved after an antislavery amendment was ratified, but his motion was resoundingly rejected. Many of Garrison’s colleagues were not hearing the bells of jubilee. With the seemingly imminent defeat of the Confederacy, questions of democracy and suffrage took center stage at the Melodeon and set off an internecine war within abolitionist circles.

In response Phillips’s close friend the fiery Abby Kelley Foster called for the expulsion of members, including the prominent Bostonians Maria Weston Chapman and her sister Anna, who believed, like Garrison, that the work of the society should stop once an emancipation amendment passed Congress. Kelley said that Garrison was “recreant to the ideas of his youth”; her husband, Stephen, went further, saying that Garrison was making a “compromise with the devil.” Phillips called for more agitation. He believed that the “press and the general public” had “measurably discontinued … the critical pressure, and rebuke of the attitude of the administration” that had been a hallmark of the abolitionist strategy early in the war. According to Phillips, this agitation had led to the end of bondage, but abolitionists should not be satisfied until all the stains of slavery and racism were removed.

In historical accounts, the issue of black voting is often overshadowed by the drama over the passage of the 13th Amendment, the subject of Steven Spielberg’s award-winning 2012 film, “Lincoln.” The suffrage question, however, assumed a position of importance long before the defeat of the Confederacy and before Congress sent an amendment formally abolishing slavery to the states on Jan. 31, 1865. At the heart of the debate lay two questions: Did the destruction of slavery automatically make freedmen and -women citizens? And was suffrage a prerogative of citizenship?

Garrison understood the 1787 Constitution differently than Phillips did. For decades, Garrison had called for black voting rights in the North. But as Lincoln himself consistently argued, under the Constitution the federal government did not have the power to abolish slavery in a state, nor did it have the power to force black suffrage (or women’s suffrage) on a state. Garrison’s view was thus in line with that of Edward Bates, Lincoln’s attorney general, who argued early in the war that voting rights were a privilege granted by individual states. Despite Bates’s opinion, the discussion at the Melodeon highlighted the fact that many abolitionists believed that the right of suffrage was a privilege and immunity of citizenship.

Discussions of Reconstruction were reserved for the afternoon session when John Parker, a Virginia slave who escaped to freedom in 1862, took the stage. Parker told the crowd that members of his “race wanted justice and liberty, and they would be thankful to anyone, Northern or Southern, who would grant them these.” The black abolitionist poet Francis Ellen Watkins Harper echoed Parker’s call for racial equality. Following Parker and Harper, Phillips offered six resolutions on the work abolitionists needed to do in order to ensure that slaves would truly be free. Phillips called for two constitutional amendments: one to end slavery and the other to provide equal protection under the law to all citizens regardless of race, a harbinger of what would later become the 14th Amendment.

A call for an abolition amendment was far from radical in January 1865, but a majority of Republicans in Congress were leery of legislating equality. Phillips argued that “no individual” was safe unless he held “in his own hands the means of protecting his own rights.” If freedmen did not have access to the ballot, they would be “ground to powder” by reconstituted Southern state governments. Phillips understood that the law had to be proactive in ensuring black suffrage. He wanted to see the strong arm of the federal government used to fundamentally reshape the South. It is important to note that Phillips did not call for a constitutional amendment dealing with black suffrage. He wanted black males incorporated into the body politic as a hard-line condition of readmission into the Union; otherwise newly readmitted Southern states could block such an amendment. Phillips had drawn a line in the sand.

Not one to back away from a fight, Garrison quickly reminded Phillips that most Northern states did not admit blacks to the franchise, either. Under Phillips’s own logic, said Garrison, these Northern states “ought not to be in the Union.” According to Garrison, Lincoln could not “safely and advantageously … enforce a rule … touching the ballot, which abolishes complexional distinctions any more than he could safely or advantageously decree that all women should enjoy the electoral right.” Garrison stated that he “wanted to hold the people” to the “point of the total abolition of slavery.” The issue of black voting, according to Garrison, was “not to be confounded with the natural right of man to his personal ownership and liberty,” though in the end he did draft a constitutional amendment that called for uniform electoral laws without “complexional distinctions.”

In a stinging attack on the ex-slave and prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass, another friend-turned-foe, Garrison asked how Douglass could equate freedom with suffrage. When he “fled from Maryland to the free soil of Massachusetts, where he found safety, protection, freedom of thought and speech,” did he not deem such freedom a “gift,” even if it did not include access to the ballot? asked Garrison.

Soon after Garrison finished, the radical British abolitionist George Thompson mounted the stage and called for “full rights and franchises” for black Americans. When he saw Douglass seated in the crowd, Thompson beckoned him to join him. Douglass said he had no intention of delivering a formal address. He said he came to New England purely as a “listener,” though this did not stop him from delivering a commentary on the war, emancipation, and reconstruction. “I am for the ‘immediate, unconditional and universal’ enfranchisement of the black man in every State of the Union,” proclaimed Douglass as he took the longtime abolitionist rallying cry and substituted “enfranchisement” for “emancipation.” Over the course of the previous year, Douglass had told audiences throughout the North that black Americans “wanted to have a voice in making the laws of the country.”

In his address at the Melodeon, which he later titled, “What the Black Man Wants,” Douglass dismissed Garrison’s belief that the franchise would come in the “natural course of events.” He believed that slavery would not truly be abolished until voting rights were extended, a point he had made consistently for 20 years. “Do you intend to sacrifice the very men who have come to the rescue of your banner in the South and incurred the lasting displeasure of their masters thereby?” asked Douglass. He wanted the federal government to strike while the iron was hot. At its most basic level, according to Douglass, Reconstruction had to include federally sanctioned provisions for the franchise, provisions that the former Confederate states could not ignore and had to accept. “I fear,” proclaimed Douglass, “that if we fail to do it now, if abolitionists fail to press it now, we may not see, for centuries to come, the same disposition that exists at this moment.”

In an eerily accurate prediction of what did indeed happen in the late 19th century, Douglass warned of the lingering “spirit” of slavery. A “malignant spirit,” a “rank undergrowth of treason,” that would thwart the “operation of the Federal Government.” The best protection for blacks, according to Douglass, was access to the ballot box. It would also be essential to the “preservation of peace.”

By May 1865, Garrison had retired from the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society, which did not disband until the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870. Phillips succeeded Garrison as president of the national organization and continued to push for a robust conception of the power of the federal government and majoritarian democracy. Not for a moment did he fail to remind abolitionists of the “vastness” of the work they had before them. At the end of his speech at the Melodeon, Phillips declared that the American “philosophy of government, since the 4th day of July, 1776” was predicated on the belief that no “class” was “safe,” no freedom “real,” no emancipation “effectual” unless men could control their political destiny.

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Sources: Eric Foner, “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877”; Michael Vorenberg, “Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery and the Thirteenth Amendment; Xi Wang, “The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860-1910”; James Oakes, “Freedom National”; James M. McPherson, “The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction”; James Brewer Stewart, “Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero”; W. Caleb McDaniel, “The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform”; William D. Kelley, “Equality of All Men Before the Law Claimed and Defended”; Francis Jackson Garrison, ed., “William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life as Told by His Children”; Walter M. Merrill, ed., “The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: Let the Oppressed Go Free, 1861-1867”; John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., “The Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. 4, 1864-1880”; Herman Belz, “Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy During the Civil War”; The Liberator, Feb. 3, 10 and 17, 1865.

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Erik J. Chaput teaches at Providence College and at The Lawrenceville School. He is the author of “The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion” and the co-editor, with Russell J. DeSimone, of the “Letters of Thomas Wilson Dorr” and “The Letters of John Brown Francis.”