d written to one of his military governors, "give the people a chance
to express their wishes at these elections. Follow forms of law as far
as convenient, but at all events get the expression of the largest number
of people possible." Above all he was afraid lest in the Southern
elections to Congress that very thing should happen which after his death
did happen. "To send a parcel of Northern men here as representatives,
elected, as would be understood (and perhaps really so), at the point of
the bayonet, would be disgraceful and outrageous." For a time he and
Congress worked together well enough, but sharp disagreement arose in
1864. He had propounded a particular plan for the reconstruction of
Southern States. Senator Wade, the formidable Chairman of the Joint
Committee on the War, and Henry Winter Davis, a keen, acrid, and fluent
man who was powerful with the House, carried a Bill under which a State
could only be reconstructed on their own plan, which differed from
Lincoln's. The Bill came to Lincoln for signature in the last hours of
the session, and, amidst frightened protests from friendly legislators
then in his room, he let it lie there unsigned, till it expired with the
session, and went on with his work. This was in July, 1864; his
re-election was at stake. The Democrats were gaining ground; he might be
giving extreme offence to the strongest Republican. "If they choose," he
said, "to make a point of this I do not doubt that they can do harm"
(indeed, those powerful men Wade and Davis now declared against his
re-election with ability and extraordinary bitterness); but he continued:
"At all events I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near
right. I must keep some standard or principle fixed within myself." The
Bill would have repressed loyal efforts already made to establish State
Governments in the South. It contained also a provision imposing the
abolition of slavery on every such reconstructed State. This was an
attempt to remedy any flaw in the constitutional effect of the
Proclamation of Emancipation. But it was certainly in itself flagrantly
unconstitutional; and the only conclusive way of abolishing slavery was
the Constitutional Amendment, for which Lincoln was now anxious. This
was not a pedantic point, for there might have been great trouble if the
courts had later found a constitutional flaw in some negro's title to
freedom. But the correctness of Lincoln's view hardly mat