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3.2] THE 37TH CONGRESS CONVENES
* In fact, while Mr. Lincoln may have been hopeful that the Confederacy would fall over at the first push, he wasn't counting on it, as he made publicly clear early in July.
The first session of the 37th Congress of the United States met in Washington on Thursday, the 4th of July 1861, having been called to special session by the President after the fall of Fort Sumter. 80 days grace had been provided to the President to conduct military actions as he saw fit, and now the time was up.
Congress was no longer the place it had been with the secessionist fire-eaters gone. A newspaper editor wondered: "What will our New England brethren do without an opportunity of denouncing the peculiar institution in the presence of its devotees?" There were in fact still some Congressmen present defending State's Rights and slavery, the most prominent of them being John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who many suspected of being a de facto agent of the Confederacy. Another was a Democratic Congressman from Ohio named Clement Laird Vallandigham, who attempted to introduce measures to send commissioners along with the Union Army in the field to receive Confederate peace overtures, and to censure President Lincoln for measures taken by the administration before Congress had met.
Vallandigham's measures went nowhere. The Southern sympathizers were a small minority. The Republicans had complete control of both houses of Congress. Of the 48 senators, 32 were Republicans, and of the 176 representatives, 106 were Republicans. The House quickly elected a pro-war speaker, Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania.
New Englanders now controlled the four powerful Senate committees that influenced war policy. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, still scarred from the murderous caning given him by Senator Brooks, was chairman of Foreign Relations, and his colleague, Henry Wilson, presided over Military Affairs. John P. Hale of New Hampshire was in charge of Naval Affairs, and William P. Fessenden of Maine led the Finance committee. These men and their associates, most prominently Senator Ben Wade of Ohio and Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, were all radical Republicans, determined to punish the South and put an end to slavery once and for all. In the House, clubfooted old Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a bitter enemy of the South and its "peculiar institution", ran the powerful Committee on Ways and Means, which exerted control on government appropriations.
* On the first day of the 37th Congress, 4 July, President Lincoln addressed the body in a joint session. The president listed the actions he had taken on his own authority: he had called up the militia; declared a blockade of the Confederacy; increased the regular military forces; suspended the writ habeas corpus; and committed the government to great expenditures. All this had been done without Congressional approval, and Lincoln needed that approval to proceed further.
He justified his actions by citing recent events: secession; seizure of Federal property; attacks on Fort Sumter, Harper's Ferry, and Norfolk; and the creation of an "insurrectionary government"; all events intended to destroy Federal authority. Lincoln expressed his intent to deal with the rebel government, as well as to recognize the new Unionist state government in western Virginia as the legitimate authority for that state. He denied the right of secession, and denied that the border states had a right to be neutral. This, he said, was "treason in effect". This last remark clearly meant Kentucky. Lincoln was not being as cautious as he had been, since Congressional elections in that state on June 30 had revealed overwhelming Unionist support among the voters.
Then the president dropped his bombshell: he requested 400,000 soldiers and $400,000,000 in funds to prosecute the conflict. Lincoln clearly expected a hard war. Finally, Lincoln expressed his hope that the Unionist majorities he believed, against all evidence, were lying quietly in the South would assert themselves, and spoke his belief that the Union could be reconstructed into an order directed by the Constitution and no different than that which existed before hostilities.
Reconciliation was unlikely. The mood of Congress was for war. The body did pass by an overwhelming majority a resolution proposed by Senator Andrew Johnson, a tough east Tennessee Unionist who had stayed in the Senate even though his state had left the Union. Johnson's resolution stated that the war had been forced by Southern secessionists, and that the Federal government would prosecute the war simply to restore the Union and uphold the Constitution. The resolution stated there was no intent to either subjugate the South or to interfere with slavery.
However, Congress still supported the drastic steps Lincoln had taken, voting him the resources he required, and resolutions providing reassurances to the South were meaningless in the face of measures taken towards making war on it. Southern sympathizers in and out of Congress were hobbled by the unilateral actions of the secessionists. The polarization was irreversible.
Despite the weakness of the pro-Southern antiwar faction, the dominance of the Republicans, and the hot rhetoric of the pro-war radicals, a bill to allow the government to seize the property of rebels led to intense dispute. At issue was one section in the bill that stated that slaves used in the Confederate war effort should be declared free. The border-state Congressmen protested angrily, calling this measure unconstitutional and a de facto proclamation of general emancipation in the rebel states. Republicans replied that it was simply a practical measure against rebels themselves, a formal endorsement of Ben Butler's policy concerning contrabands. The radicals used the opportunity to blast their opponents, Thaddeus Stevens angrily responding:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Who pleads the Constitution against our proposed action? Who says the Constitution must come in, in bar of our action? It is the advocates of rebels, of rebels who have sought to overthrow the Constitution and trample it in the dust ... I deny that they have any right to invoke this Constitution ... I deny that they can be permitted to come here and tell us we must be loyal to the Constitution.
END QUOTE
The measure was adopted.
The failure of this body to impeach and convict the president is practically a shock, I tell you! Why, the country must have been so solidly behind war that you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a rifle pointed South.
This clinches it for you guys, the "We win, because we won" argument simply cannot be refuted.