Lincoln Looks West: From the Mississippi to the Pacific

3. Lincoln, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Admission of Nevada

➢ 113 3 ➢ Lincoln, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Admission of Nevada Earl S. Pomeroy The scholars and the debunkers have pared away much of the “Lincoln legend”—the hagiography which not only canonized the man but presented him posthumously with a united and sympathetic party. Today the schoolboy knows that Lincoln was both political manager and statesman, and he knows that Lincoln had bitter enemies and outspoken critics among those who elected him. But the legend dies hard: it is a blend of truth, error, and fabrication in which the revisionists themselves have not disdained to quarry. Most of them accept a story of the admission of Nevada whose best claim to acceptance is that it seems to confirm aptly both legend and revision. The proposal of the Thirteenth Amendment was to President Lincoln one of the great political objects of 1864–65. “The passage of this amendment,” he told Representative James Rollins of Missouri in January 1865, “will clinch the whole subject. It will bring the war, I have no doubt, rapidly to a close.”1 The crucial vote was in the House, where the amendment failed on June 15, 1864,2 and passed on January 31, 1865, by the narrow margin of 119 to 56—2 over the required two-thirds.3 Ratification was easy and uneventful.4 Charles Anderson Dana, assistant secretary of war under Stanton and later editor of the New York Sun, published in McClure’s Magazine for April 1898 a temptingly graphic and circumstantial story, which has led many to identify Lincoln’s strategy toward the Thirteenth Amendment with the passage of the Nevada Enabling Act: From Pacific Historical Review 12 (December 1943): 362–68.  Earl S. Pomeroy 114 Lincoln was a supreme politician. He understood politics because he understood human nature. I had an illustration of this in the spring of 1864. The administration had decided that the constitution of the United States should be amended so that slavery should be prohibited. . . . In order thus to amend the constitution, it was necessary first to have the proposed amendment approved by three-fourths of the States. When that question came to be considered, the issue was seen to be so close that one State more was necessary. The State of Nevada was organized and admitted to answer that purpose. . . . In March, 1864, the question of allowing Nevada to form a State government finally came up in the House of Representatives. . . . For a long time beforehand the question had been canvassed anxiously. . . . “Dana,” he [Lincoln] said, “I am very anxious about this vote. It has got to be taken next week. The time is very short. It is going to be a great deal closer than I wish it was.” “There are plenty of Democrats who will vote for it,” I replied. “There is James E. English of Connecticut; I think he is sure, isn’t he?” “Oh, yes; he is sure on the merits of the question.” “Then,” said I, “there’s ‘Sunset’ Cox of Ohio. How is he?” “He is sure and fearless. But there are some others that I am not clear about. There are three that you can deal with better than anybody else, perhaps, as you know them all. . . .” . . . One man was from New Jersey and two from New York. . . . “Here [said Lincoln] is the alternative: that we carry this vote, or be compelled to raise another million, and I don’t know how many more, men, and fight no one knows how long. It is a question of three votes or new armies.”5 Dana recalled that he secured those three votes for Nevada by judicious promises of presidential patronage, which Andrew Johnson, as president, refused to honor. Though Nevada happened to be the only new western state of the Civil War years, the admission of new states had attracted interest and suspicion among Republicans. Thaddeus Stevens, while favoring the West Virginia bill on its passage, suggested that originally it had been a phase of a presidential conspiracy to control Congress;6 he and Roscoe Conkling had been instrumental in delaying consideration in the House from July to December of 1862.7 Attorney General Bates, however, later said that the admission of West Virginia was “conceived, as a fraudulent party trick, by a few unprincipled ➢ Lincoln, the Thirteenth Amendment, and Nevada 115 Radicals, and the prurient ambition of a few meritless aspirants urged it, with indecent haste...