l incoln’s s hadow 73
his wartime assumption that the best alternatives for Reconstruction could
be sorted out when the guns fell silent.
To begin with, he would have had few resources for coping with a
devastated South and the particular crisis faced by the former slaves.
Th e federal government had little organizational capacity for meeting
their needs. Although Congress established the Freedman’s Bureau
under the War Department in early 1865 as a stop-gap entity for reset-
tling blacks on abandoned land, the Bureau had no fi rm legal basis for
transferring title to them. Here was another example of how the lack
of planning and preparation invited confusion rather than constructive
solutions. In turn, the insuffi ciency of preparation for addressing the
urgent needs of destitute and uprooted freedmen—despite abundant
warnings about their plight in the last two years of the war—suggests
that Lincoln had badly underestimated the magnitude of the problems
that Reconstruction would face.
Add next the institutional dynamic that peace sets in motion: power
swings back to the legislative branch. Lincoln knew this, since he had
witnessed what happened to James Polk after the war with Mexico.
Polk achieved all of his territorial ambitions in the confl ict, only to lose
control over the postwar debate when an obscure Pennsylvania repre-
sentative, David Wilmot, off ered his proviso to ban slavery from all of
the newly acquired lands. Congress already had made plain that it
would no longer accept Lincoln’s Reconstruction formula: in December
1864 lawmakers declined to count Louisiana’s electoral votes in the
presidential election and refused to seat the Arkansas delegation.
When the new 39th Congress fi nally met a year later, it would surely
have insisted on establishing the terms for readmitting states to the
Union, even if the president had been Abraham Lincoln rather than
Andrew Johnson. Lincoln paid heavily, then, for his success in
prolonging presidential Reconstruction by turning back any congres-
sional alternative in December 1864. For a few additional months of
exclusive control, he sacrifi ced the broader legitimacy and shared insti-
tutional commitment that results when a policy is jointly “owned” by
Congress and the White House.
Finally, divisive political forces were unleashed with the Union
victory, and these would have entangled any president. Th e war had
set the stage for a deep split within the Republican coalition. O n