The Pocket Veto and the Orange Santa Claus

[David Lockmiller]

President Lincoln “struck out” with congressional radicals.

Team of Rivals at pages 639-640 reads:

The goodwill engendered among congressional radicals by Lincoln’s appointment of Fessenden was swiftly eroded by his refusal to sign the punitive Reconstruction bill that passed the Congress in the final hours of July 2, 1864, before it adjourned for the summer. [T]he bill laid down a rigid formula for bringing the seceded states back into the Union. The process differed in significant ways from the more lenient plan Lincoln had announced the previous December. Lincoln had proposed to rehabilitate individual states as quickly as possible, hoping their return would deflate Southern morale and thereby shorten the war. . . . Finally, the bill imposed emancipation by congressional fiat where Lincoln believed that such a step overstepped constitutional authority and instead proposed a constitutional amendment to ensure that slavery could never return.

Rather than veto the bill outright, Lincoln exercised a little-known provision called the pocket veto, according to which unsigned bills still on the president’s desk when Congress adjourns do not become law. In a written proclamation, he explained that while he would not protest if any individual state adopted the plan outlined in the bill, he did not think it wise to require every state to adhere to a single inflexible system.

Lincoln understood that he would be politically damaged if the radicals “chose to make a point upon this.” Nevertheless, he told John Hay, “I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right: I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself.” He would rely upon this conviction in the days ahead when Wade and Davis published a bitter manifesto against him. He was not surprised by their anger at the suppression of their bill, but he was stung by their vitriolic tone and their suggestion that his veto had been prompted by crass electoral concerns. “To be wounded in the house of one’s friends,” he told Noah Brooks, “is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man,” the same sentiment he had expressed when he lost his first Senate race in 1855. Now personal sorrow was compounded by the realization that radical opposition might divide the Republican Party, undoing the unity he had struggled to maintain through the turbulent years of his presidency.