Schism

Preview - R.F.H. Chapter 1 Ending Slavery part 1

Chapter 1: Slavery

A KING’S CURE FOR ALL THE EVILS

Imagine a quiet moment in the White House on February 1st, 1865.  It has been nearly four years of war since The Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter.  During that time President Lincoln had constantly advocated that the Northern Army aggressively confront the South and in doing so had proved himself a masterful Commander in Chief.  But for the last year, he had directed another battle behind the scenes, and achieved victory just the day before, when the House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

If Lincoln turned away from the men gathered around the long desk in the middle of the room to look out one of the two tall windows, he would have seen the base of the Washington Monument.  The obelisk wasn’t what we see now.  It was only one-third finished, its construction in limbo since 1854.  If the President looked away from the window, into the room, he would see the line of maps on the left wall that obscured much of the blue diamond patterned wallpaper.  As he turned back to the table and settled his feet on the well-worn green and yellow carpet, the twenty-year old chair beneath him undoubtedly creaked under even his slight 180 pounds.

Before him on the table was the document that accomplished something he had always wanted, but had only recently begun to think was possible.  Lincoln knew that a presidential signature was not needed for a constitutional amendment, but he took up the simple wooden pen in his hand and it is easy to imagine that he paused before he signed his name.  For, after all he had done to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, which would forever end slavery in the United States of America, the President deserved a quiet moment.

The job of passing the amendment had not been easy, not for Lincoln, nor for those who labored with him, and it had almost been derailed by the possibility of peace.  The day before, as the House of Representatives was preparing to vote on the amendment a second time, a rumor began circulating through the capital that a peace commission from the south was on its way to Washington, D.C. to discuss terms for the end of the Civil War.  Lincoln was fully aware that a Confederate team was on its way to the nearby Fort Monroe, but also knew that peace talks could stall the momentum that had built behind the Thirteenth Amendment.  In order to protect the amendment’s passage, Honest Abe stretched the truth when he spoke to these rumors by saying, “So far as I know, there are no peace commissioners in the city, or likely to be in it.” 

And this convenient stretching of the truth was not Lincoln’s first bit of political trickery in his fight to abolish slavery in the United States.  Because President Lincoln knew what was at stake, because the United States would become that last English-speaking nation to make slavery illegal, because he knew the enormity of the injustice he had to correct, he let nothing get in the way of this amendment. 

In 1864, after the Senate had voted in favor of the amendment and it had been voted down once by the House of Representatives, Lincoln knew that he would need more congressional and state support for its passage and eventual ratification.  He worried that his Emancipation Proclamation would be struck down at the end of the war, so he set about lining up not only votes in The House to pass the amendment, but also states to ratify it.  To this end, he helped turn the territory of Nevada (whose Secretary was Orion Clemens, the older brother of Samuel “Mark Twain” Clemens) into a state.  In addition to being 20,000 people short of the 60,000 person population requirement to become a state, Nevada lacked the time to send a copy of its new constitution to Washington by conventional means.  So, the entire document was sent by telegraph.  The 16,543 word document (the longest and most expensive telegraph ever sent at that time) had to be relayed four times before it reached Lincoln.  But on October 31st, 1864, just eight days before the national election, the president declared Nevada a state.  Its congressman, Henry G. Worthington voted in favor of the Thirteenth amendment on January 31st of the next year and Nevada later became the fifteenth state to ratify the amendment.