Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
On Christmas Eve 1864, Abraham Lincoln wrote to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks in New Orleans to reassure him that he was master “in regard to re-organizing a State government for Louisiana” and “in regard to the military matters of the Department.” Frustrated at the slow pace of Banks’s reorganization efforts, the anxious president also entreated his commander of the Department of the Gulf to “give us a free-state re-organization of Louisiana, in the shortest possible time.”
Banks had already been in New Orleans for nearly two years, having replaced the notorious Benjamin “Spoons” Butler in late 1862. One of the Union’s many political generals, Banks was a former speaker of the House of Representatives and Massachusetts governor who had yet to distinguish himself on the battlefield (and never would). His less-than-stirring performance during the Shenandoah Valley campaigns had earned him the sobriquet “Nothing Positive” Banks. One modern day biographer characterized Banks as a man who dealt “in compromises and reversals, catch phrases, weasel words, and politicians’ tricks.” On the other hand, noted the ever-observant Navy secretary, Gideon Welles, although Banks probably lacked “the energy, power or ability of Butler,” he was “less reckless and unscrupulous.”
His “politicians’ tricks” almost certainly made Banks an appealing choice when Lincoln went looking for a general to preside over the “reconstruction” of Louisiana. Indeed, soon after arriving in New Orleans, Banks began reversing many of Butler’s strict and unpopular public-order measures, while continuing his predecessor’s public works and food distribution initiatives. On Jan. 29, 1863, he instituted a work program for enslaved blacks, many of whom had found their way to the city upon learning of the Emancipation Proclamation (which, since it only applied to areas still under Confederate control, excluded most of them).
The program required that blacks sign annual contracts calling for ten-hour work days in return for a monthly wage of $3 or 5% of the yearly proceeds from the crop’s sale as well as food, shelter, and medical care. The regulations protected the newly contracted laborers from physical punishment, but prevented them from leaving the plantations where they worked without the owner’s permission. Provost marshals monitored the program, capturing runaway laborers and subjecting “vagrant” blacks to involuntary public work.
At its peak, Banks’ system employed 50,000 workers on 1,500 estates. Radicals angrily accused Banks of mollifying the planter class by creating a program in which “the relation of master and slave … is the same as heretofore.” But others, such as Chaplain George H. Hepworth, one of Banks’s labor superintendents, insisted that “the whole plan was devised and executed for the well-being of the negro alone.”
By 1863 the issues of emancipation and freedmen’s rights, especially the franchise, were uppermost in the minds of Louisiana’s political leaders. Led by former Representative Michael Hahn, Moderates enthusiastically embraced emancipation while opposing immediate civil or political rights for the freedmen. Thomas Durant and Benjamin Flanders controlled the Radical faction, which wanted to abolish slavery and give black males the right to vote. Durant and Flanders were both long-time New Orleanians, but most of the prominent Radicals were newcomers – Treasury officials (many beholden to Secretary Salmon P. Chase for their appointments) and Northern military officers. The third group, the Conservative Unionists — planters and businessmen who wanted to retain slavery — comprised the least powerful political faction.
The presence of the free people of color, or creoles, a unique segment of New Orleans’s black population who had traditionally enjoyed elevated social standing and privilege among the larger free black community, brought added tension to the issues surrounding black rights. The gens de couleur libre provided a leadership cadre of individuals who advocated aggressively for the franchise and other rights for blacks.
Into this swirl of political factions and ideologies fell Banks and his supporters – specifically, somewhere between the moderate and the radical camps, supporting emancipation, limited black suffrage, black education and black service in the militia. Banks initially sought to make common cause with the Free State of Louisiana, an amalgam of Unionist clubs in New Orleans and the parishes under Union control formed in May 1863. Chaired by Durant, the organization aimed to create a new constitution, a precondition for Louisiana’s readmittance to the Union. Lincoln endorsed the effort, and pushed its leaders to complete their task by the end of 1863.
At Durant’s prodding, the Free State’s General Committee campaigned to register voters and prepare for the election of delegates to a constitutional convention. As 1863 progressed Banks, who had come to distrust Durant, worked to undermine the registration efforts; when Durant made a direct appeal to Lincoln to intercede, his request fell on deaf ears. The president did not trust Southern Unionists like Durant and his close ally, Benjamin Flanders. Unaware of Banks’s obstructionism, Lincoln believed Durant had failed to move the reconstruction effort in Louisiana forward. And Flanders was known to be a supporter of Salmon Chase’s presidential aspirations. Lincoln was also in the middle of articulating his own Reconstruction policy — the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction delivered as a part of his annual message to Congress on Dec. 8 (see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/lincolns-10-percent-plan/).
Instead, Lincoln issued his Christmas Eve delegation of supreme authority to Banks. Emboldened by this presidential vote of confidence, Banks moved rapidly to neutralize his opponents. In early 1864, he deposed Durant as leader of the Free State party, effectively splitting the group and assuring that the military and the moderate political faction would dominate the reconstruction process. On Jan. 11, 1864, Banks announced an election for state officials, open to any white male who took a loyalty oath, to be held on Feb. 22. An election of delegates for a constitutional convention was to follow on March 28.
A surprisingly high number of voters turned out to choose from among three candidates for governor. Running on a platform supporting emancipation but opposing political, economic, and social equality for African Americans, Banks’s favored candidate, Michael Hahn, easily defeated both the conservative and radical candidates.
In a letter to Hahn, Lincoln congratulated him “as the first-free-state Governor of Louisiana.” The president then weighed in on the issue of black suffrage, about which he had recently been petitioned by a group of free people of color from New Orleans. Lincoln asked “whether some of the colored people may not be let in — as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks … But,” he noted in closing, “this is only a suggestion … to you alone.”
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The key, though, wasn’t Hahn’s political abilities, but the adoption of a new state constitution by a convention split among the moderate Unionists, Radicals and a small contingency of reactionaries. This “grand Convention of Imbeciles,” designated as such by a Radical disgusted by the delegates’ lavish spending on everything from cigars, liquor and ice to a $150 pen case for Banks, was in session from April until late July. The first order of business was emancipation, a step necessitated by Lincoln’s exclusion of the 13 Louisiana parishes under Union control from the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation. All but a few delegates agreed with Edward Durell, a federal judge who chaired the convention, when he said, “If you think slavery exists, go out in the streets and see if you can get your slave to obey you.”
On May 11, the convention delegates voted 72 to 13 to abolish slavery throughout the entire state (after unsuccessfully petitioning Congress to compensate slave owners). This step hardly signaled the beginning of an effort to eliminate prejudice against blacks: Despite Durell’s remonstrance that delegates “are to work no distinction of races, no distinction of color,” delegates too frequently inveighed against race amalgamation and alleged black degeneracy while raising the specter of race war. Ezra Heistand, a Radical delegate, encapsulated the racist attitudes of many of his colleagues toward the newly emancipated blacks: “We will put them in a situation to sustain themselves by their own industry. … If they will not make the proper effort, why let them … disappear from the earth as other worthless races have done before them.”
Throughout the convention, Banks and Hahn both interfered where necessary to ensure the final product, adopted on July 22, 1864, would be a document Abraham Lincoln could approve. The new constitution authorized public education for everyone, black and white, between the ages of 6 and 18; established minimum wages for public employment; and moved the state capital to New Orleans. On the hot button issue of access to the voting booth, the convention overrode Banks’s support for black voting rights, although he did manage to salvage a provision confirming that the state legislature might at some future date extend suffrage to black men who fought for the Union, owned property or were literate.
By the time the convention concluded its business in July, Lincoln had relieved Banks of all duties as a military field commander after he led the disastrous Red River campaign into Arkansas. The president ordered Banks to oversee the September elections, in which voters approved the new constitution by a vote of 6,836 to 1,566 and selected a new legislature and three congressmen. The president then ordered the general to Washington to lobby Congress on behalf of Louisiana’s constitution and newly elected congressmen.
Banks’s efforts in the capital proved fruitless. The failure of the Louisiana constitution to grant black suffrage led to a filibuster by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who exacted a bit of political revenge on behalf of Thomas Durant and Benjamin Flanders. The Congress that met in December 1864 refused to seat Louisiana’s congressional delegation and voided the state’s electoral votes in the 1864 election. The final blow came when Congress rejected the president’s plan for Louisiana in early 1865. The Free State of Louisiana was stillborn.
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Sources: Herman Belz, “Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War”; Joseph G. Dawson III, “Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862-1877”; Eric Foner, “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877”; David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., “Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History”; James G. Hollandsworth Jr., “Pretense of Glory: The Life of General Nathaniel P. Banks”; Ted Tunnell, “Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877”; David Work, “Lincoln’s Political Generals”; “House Divided: Letter from Lincoln to Hahn“; “Lincoln’s Letter to Hahn.”
Rick Beard, an independent historian and exhibition curator, is co-author of the National Park Service publication “Slavery in the United States: A Brief Narrative History.”