Lincoln and Congress by William C. Harris (review)

Can an entire life of research and writing be encapsulated in a short book? William Harris's Lincoln and Congress proves that it can. This is familiar ground trod by the boots of countless scholars. There is so much going on in it that the challenge seems almost insurmountable. But Harris has written over a dozen books on the Lincoln–Civil War era, and no one knows this ground more thoroughly than he. Harris's work here is both concise and learned, and, most important, its judgment is almost always persuasive.

Balance is Harris's organizing principle. As was Lincoln's. Harris is prudent in his views. So was Lincoln. Long a Whig before a Republican, Lincoln was wont to let Congress manage its own affairs, which in practice meant that he had to bear, with stoic patience, criticism of his actions and his inaction. When the war came, Lincoln had to balance the exigencies of domestic insurrection with the reality of Confederate belligerency and the need for expedition with constitutional restraints on the executive. He needed to reach out for congressional support, knowing that a good portion of both houses, even with the southern democracy removing itself, was jealous of its own prerogatives. Within Congress, pro-Union Democrats sought to reassure their own constituencies while giving Lincoln only grudging support. The more reform-minded Republicans battled the more conservative members of their own party, leaving Lincoln in no-man's land.

Harris deftly manages this three-ring circus with a series of this-but-that summaries. He concludes that Lincoln and Congress formed an effective "partnership" despite "tension and conflict" to win the war, abolish slavery, and begin to heal the nation's wounds (7). Perhaps Harris is too ready to give credit and forgive transgressions, again assuming a stance that Lincoln himself appeared to prefer. For example, concluding that the 37th Congress "had achieved a remarkable record" is a little too fulsome (75). Then again, when a scholar has spent so much of his time and energy studying a man like Lincoln, some Lincoln must rub off on the scholar.

Harris's prose is a nice mixture of the stately and the dramatic, as he follows the "lively debate" over emancipation in the District and the "endless" debate over the militia bill (37, 38). Harris knows that tracing out all of these debates over the course of the wartime Congresses would not only turn a succinct book of 135 pages of text into a multivolume monster, it would also overwhelm the ordinary reader in names, dates, and detail. Thus, Harris had to select which measures, and which debates over those measures, deserved his attention. Following the rule that a topic had to be important for the development of the nation-state as well as at the time, his choices—confiscation, emancipation, finance, the development of western lands and eastern industry, rules for the conduct of war, and tests of separation of powers—hit the mark. Lincoln was prone to fits of abject despair, but as Senator Orville Browning privately told the president after a brush-up between him and congressional leaders of his own party, "the fortunes of the country are bound up with our fortune and you must stand firmly at your post" (64). Plainly, Harris agrees.

There is one topic that a reader might believe Harris slighted. Most of the recent accounts of Lincoln, the war, and Congress focus on the emancipation issue. Harris does not ignore it, but neither does he give it more space than disputes over military affairs or Lincoln's plan for reconstruction. What he does show is how reluctant Lincoln was to accord freed slaves the full panoply of civil rights and liberties. Suffrage for blacks was the sticking point in the last days of Lincoln's first term. The account of the Sumner-Trumbull dispute over the Louisiana bill's exclusion of black voters shows how politically astute Lincoln's hesitation was...