70 e lusive v ictories
win the war. As he saw it, the Union’s approach to Reconstruction
ought to be designed to induce southerners to lay down their arms.
Were it possible to convince some to abandon the Confederacy in
exchange for generous terms that let them retain most of their preroga-
tives, the enemy would be weakened and southern defeat hastened.
Yet wartime leniency might subvert long-term plans to remake the
social order in the South in ways vital to protect the possibility that the
former slaves might achieve economic independence and social dignity.
If we understand war to be a means for achieving political goals, then
these goals rather than military victory become a statesman’s primary
responsibility. Amid the carnage, though, a political leader faces
constant demands to fi nd the quickest path to a successful military
outcome. Lincoln resolved the tension by choosing to focus on the
immediate military objective at the expense of the future.
Th e advance of Union armies beginning in the earliest months of the
confl ict compelled the administration and the army to begin to address
how best to assist southern blacks abruptly freed from slavery. In the
Sea Islands of South Carolina (1861), the parts of Louisiana near New
Orleans (1862), and the Mississippi Valley after the capture of Vicks-
burg (1863), the national government eff ectively initiated a great social
experiment, guiding the transition from racial subordination to a new
order of legal emancipation. Army commanders in different places
adopted diff erent approaches, ranging from eff orts by a small legion of
northern reformers on the Sea Islands to educate blacks and foster some
measure of self-suffi ciency to mandated annual labor contracts that
returned erstwhile bondsmen to their plantations under conditions
scarcely better than those under chattel slavery. Th e harsher approaches
sparked opposition from their black subjects, who demanded stronger
legal protections and then called for the right to vote to better secure
their legal and economic status. Th eir cause found a warm reception
among Radicals in Congress, eager to make certain that the old
southern planter aristocracy would never regain power and to lay a
foundation for lasting Republican Party infl uence in the region.
Although Lincoln’s views on the long-term restructuring of southern
society were ambiguous and in fl ux, his proximate objective pushed
him in a more conservative direction. From the outset of the war, he
believed that a lenient approach might encourage southern whites to