A prevalent theme in complaints about Grant concerned his drinking. According to one story, Lincoln deflected such charges with humor, telling a delegation of congressmen that he would like to know Grant's brand of whiskey so he could send some to his other generals.33 It is hard to separate fact from fiction in this matter. Many wartime stories of Grant's drunkenness are false; others are at best dubious. Grant's meteoric rise to fame provoked jealousy in the hearts of men who indulged in gossip to denigrate him. Subject to sick headaches brought on by strain and loss of sleep, Grant sometimes acted unwell in a manner to give observers the impression that he had been drinking. But even when the myths have been stripped away, a hard substratum of truth about Grant's drinking remains. He may have been an alcoholic in the medical meaning of that term. He was a binge drinker. For months he could go without liquor, but if he once imbibed it was hard for him to stop. His wife and his chief of staff John A. Rawlins were his best protectors. With their help, Grant stayed on the wagon nearly all the time during the war. If he did get drunk (and this is much disputed by historians)
32. Cadwallader Washburn to Elihu B. Washburne (the brothers spelled their surname differently), March 28, 1863, in Nevins, War, II, 388; Foote, Civil War II, 217. See also T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, 225–26.
33. John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen (New York, 1907), 64. Although some historians regard this story as apocryphal, and in any case it appears not to have been original with Lincoln—having been told about other generals in earlier wars—Bruce Catton considers Eaton a reliable source and accepts the story as true. Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston, 1960), 396–97.
it never happened at a time crucial to military operations. Recognized today as an illness, alcoholism in Grant's time was considered a moral weakness. Grant himself believed it so and battled to overcome the shame and guilt of his weakness. In the end, as a recent scholar has suggested, his predisposition to alcoholism may have made him a better general. His struggle for self-discipline enabled him to understand and discipline others; the humiliation of prewar failures gave him a quiet humility that was conspicuously absent from so many generals with a reputation to protect; because Grant had nowhere to go but up, he could act with more boldness and decision than commanders who dared not risk failure.34
Despite Lincoln's continuing faith in Grant, he permitted Secretary of War Stanton to send a special agent in March 1863 to investigate matters in the Army of the Tennessee. The agent was Charles A. Dana, former managing editor of the New York Tribune and now an assistant secretary of war. Dana went to the Mississippi ostensibly to straighten out the paymaster service in western armies, but Grant was aware of his real mission. Instead of giving Dana the cold shoulder—as some of his staff advised—Grant welcomed him. It was a wise action. Dana sized up the general favorably and began sending a stream of commendatory dispatches to Washington. Grant was "the most modest, the most disinterested and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb," wrote Dana later in summary of his impressions
34. The best analysis of Grant's drinking, informed by modern studies of alcoholism, is Lyle W. Dorsett, "The Problem of Grant's Drinking During the Civil War," Hayes Historical Journal, 4 (1983). Among historians, Bruce Catton and Kenneth P. Williams question or deny Grant's weakness for liquor, while Benjamin Thomas, William McFeely, Shelby Foote, and Lyle Dorsett tend to accept its truth. The only detailed eye-witness account of a Grant binge during the war was written thirty years later by Sylvanus Cadwallader, a Chicago newspaper correspondent who spent more than two years with Grant's armies during the war: see Cadwallader, Three Years with Grant, ed. Benjamin P. Thomas (New York, 1955), 102–21. Catton and Williams and John Y. Simon challenge the authenticity of this particular story, though other historians accept it. For additional discussions of the issue of Grant's drinking, including the Cadwallader story, see Catton, Grant Moves South, 95–97, 462–65, 535–36; Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General, 5 vols. (New York, 1949–59), IV, 439–51, 577–82; exchange between Kenneth Williams and Benjamin Thomas in American Heritage, 7 (1956), 106–11; Foote, Civil War, II, 416–21; William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York, 1981), esp. 132–35, 148; John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 14 vols. (Carbon-dale, III., 1967–85), VIII, 322–25n.
at the time. "Not a great man except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep and gifted with courage that never faltered."35
Men in the ranks shared Dana's opinion. They appreciated Grant's lack of "superfluous flummery," his tendency to wear a plain uniform "without scarf, sword, or trappings of any sort save the double-starred shoulder straps." A private reported that the men "seem to look upon him as a friendly partner of theirs, not as an arbitrary commander." Instead of cheering him when he rode by, they were likely to "greet him as they would address one of their neighbors at home. 'Good morning, General,' 'Pleasant day, General,' and like expressions are the greetings he meets everywhere. . . . There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command over the river in the shortest time possible."36
Get them over the river Grant would soon do, with spectacular results. But at the end of March 1863 the northern public could see only the failures of the past four months—on the Mississippi as well as in Virginia. "This winter is, indeed, the Valley Forge of the war," wrote a Wisconsin officer. Such a remark at least implied a hope for ultimate success. But many other Yankees had given up hope. Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., recovering from his Antietam wound, wrote dispiritedly that "the army is tired with its hard and terrible experience. . . . I've pretty much made up my mind that the South have achieved their independence." The staunchly loyal Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, believed that "an armistice is bound to come during the year ′63. The rebs can't be conquered by the present machinery."37 Into this crisis of confidence strode the copperheads with their program for peace without victory.
35. Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War (New York, 1902), 61—62.
36. Quotations from Catton, Grant Moves South, 390–91, and Foote, Civil War, II, 218–19.
37. Wisconsin officer quoted in Catton, Glory Road, 95; Mark DeWolfe Howe, ed., Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1861–1864 (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), 73; Medill to Elihu Washburne, Jan. 16, 1863, in Catton, Grant Moves South, 369–70.
20
Fire in the Rear
I
Despite his preoccupation with military matters, Lincoln told Charles Sumner in January 1863 that he feared " 'the fire in the rear'—meaning the Democracy, especially at the Northwest—more than our military chances."1 The president had ample grounds for concern. The peace faction of the Democratic party grew stronger with each setback of Union armies. And the enactment of a conscription law in March 1863 gave the antiwar movement additional stimulus.
By 1863 Clement L. Vallandigham had emerged as leader of the Peace Democrats. Only forty-two years old, the handsome Ohio congressman had cut his political eyeteeth on the Jeffersonian philosophy of limited government. "It is the desire of my heart," he declared soon after the outbreak of war, "to restore the Union, the Federal Union as it was forty years ago." To this desire Vallandigham added sympathy for the South produced by descent from a Virginia family and marriage to the daughter of a Maryland planter. Although Ohio Republicans had gerrymandered him into defeat in the 1862 election, Vallandigham went out with a bang rather than a whimper. In a farewell speech to the House on January 14, 1863, and a subsequent tour from New Jersey
1. Sumner to Francis Lieber, Jan. 17, 1863, in Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 4 vols. (Boston, 1877–93), IV, 114.
to Ohio, he set forth his indictment of the war and his proposals for peace.2
Vallandigham professed himself a better unionist than the Republicans whose fanaticism had provok
ed this ruinous war. These same Republicans, he continued, were now fighting not for Union but for abolition. And what had they accomplished? "Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer." The South could never be conquered; the only trophies of this war were "defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchres . . . the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation . . . of freedom of the press and of speech . . . which have made this country one of the worst despotisms on earth for the past twenty months." What was the solution? "Stop fighting. Make an armistice. . . . Withdraw your army from the seceded States." Start negotiations for reunion. Vallandigham had no use for the "fanaticism and hypocrisy" of the objection that an armistice would preserve slavery. "I see more of barbarism and sin, a thousand times, in the continuance of this war . . . and the enslavement of the white race by debt and taxes and arbitrary power" than in Negro slavery. "In considering terms of settlement we [should] look only to the welfare, peace, and safety of the white race, without reference to the effect that settlement may have on the African."3
This became the platform of Peace Democrats for the next two years. During the early months of 1863 this faction commanded the support of a large minority of the party—perhaps even a majority. A mass meeting of New York Democrats resolved that the war "against the South is illegal, being unconstitutional, and should not be sustained." And while Governor Horatio Seymour of New York promised "to make every sacrifice . . . for the preservation of this Union," he also denounced emancipation as "bloody, barbarous, revolutionary" and pledged to "maintain and defend the sovereignty" of New York against unconstitutional violations by the federal government.4
2. Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970), chaps. 1–6; quotation from p. 79.
3. Vallandigham, The Great Civil War in America (New York, 1863), a pamphlet publication of his January speech in the House, reprinted in Frank Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), II, 697–738. Quotations from pp. 706, 707, 711, 719, 732.
4. New York meeting quoted in Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1964 [1942]), 147; Seymour quoted in Nevins, War, II, 394, and in William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York, 1948), 282.
In Butternut regions of the Midwest, economic grievances reinforced the cultural attitudes of people descended from southern settlers. The war had cut off their normal trade routes along the Mississippi and its tributaries, forcing them into dependence on Yankee railroads and canals feeding an east-west pattern of trade. Real and imaginary grievances against high rates and poor service on these routes exacerbated the hostility of Butternuts toward New Englanders whom they charged with controlling their destiny through manipulation of Congress as well as of the economy. "Shall we sink down as serfs to the heartless, speculative Yankees," asked an Ohio editor, "swindled by his tariffs, robbed by his taxes, skinned by his railroad monopolies?"5
This sense of Butternut identity with the South and hostility to the Northeast gave rise to talk among western Democrats of a "Northwest Confederacy" that would reconstruct a Union with the South, leaving New England out in the cold until she confessed the error of her ways and humbly petitioned for readmission. However bizarre such a scheme appears in retrospect, it commanded much rhetorical support during the war. "The people of the West demand peace, and they begin to more than suspect that New England is in the way," warned Vallandigham in January 1863. "If you of the East, who have found this war against the South, and for the negro, gratifying to your hate or profitable to your purse, will continue it . . . [be prepared for] eternal divorce between the West and the East." Though less extreme than Vallandigham, Congressman Samuel S. Cox of Ohio agreed that "the erection of the states watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries into an independent Republic is the talk of every other western man."6 This threat to reopen the Mississippi by a separate peace generated General McClernand's proposal to reopen it with his separate campaign against Vicksburg. The whole issue lent an urgency to Grant's efforts to capture Vicksburg and a bitter edge to criticisms of his initial failures to do so.
An important law passed by Congress in February 1863 intensified the alienation of western Democrats: the National Banking Act. This measure owed much to Secretary of the Treasury Chase's desire to augment
5. Columbus Crisis, Jan. 21, 1863, quoted in Gray, Hidden Civil War, 125. For the regional economic bases of copperheadism, see Frank L. Klement, "Economic Aspects of Middle Western Copperheadism," Historian, 14 (1951), 27–44, and Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960).
6. Vallandigham, The Great Civil War, in Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets, 724, 729–30; Cox, "Puritanism in Politics," in Cox, Eight Years in Congress (New York, 1865), 283.
the market for war bonds; it owed even more to the Whiggish Republican desire to rationalize the decentralized, unstable structure of state banks and to create a uniform banknote currency. Treasury notes (greenbacks) provided a national currency, but they circulated alongside several hundred types of banknotes of varying degrees of soundness. No effective national regulation of banking had existed since the Jacksonian era. A nation "which leaves the power to regulate its currency to the legislation of thirty-four different states abandons one of the essential attributes of sovereignty," said Representative Samuel Hooper of Massachusetts. "The policy of this country," added Senate Finance Committee Chairman John Sherman, "ought to be to make everything national as far as possible; to nationalize our country so that we shall love our country."7
On February 25, 1863, the National Banking Act became law with the affirmative votes of 78 percent of the Republicans overcoming the negative votes of 91 percent of the Democrats. As supplemented by additional legislation the next year, this law authorized the granting of federal charters to banks that met certain standards, required them to purchase U. S. bonds in an amount equal to one-third of their capital, and permitted them to issue banknotes equal to 90 percent of the value of such bonds. Not until Congress drove state banknotes out of circulation with a 10 percent tax levied on them in 1865 did most state banks convert to federal charters. But the 1863 law laid the groundwork for the banking system that prevailed for a half-century after the war. Not surprisingly, Jacksonian Democrats in the Old Northwest denounced "this monstrous Bank Bill" as new evidence of the wartime conspiracy by "the money monopoly of New England" to "destroy the fixed institutions of the States, and to build up a central moneyed despotism."8
The years of real passion on the bank issue, however, belonged to the 1830s and 1890s. In 1863, hostility to emancipation was the principal fuel that fired antiwar Democrats. On this issue, also, New England was the main enemy. The "Constitution-breaking, law-defying, negro-loving Phariseeism of New England" had caused the war, said Samuel S. Cox. "In the name of God," cried a former governor of Illinois in December 1862, "no more bloodshed to gratify a religious fanaticism." An Ohio editor branded Lincoln a "half-witted usurper" and his Emancipation
7. Quotations from Bray Hammond, Sovereignty and an Empty Purse: Banks and Politics in the Civil War (Princeton, 1970), 314, 326–27.
8. Klement, "Economic Aspects of Middle Western Copperheadism," loc. cit., 39–40.
Proclamation "monstrous, impudent, and heinous . . . insulting to God as to man, for it declares those 'equal' whom God created unequal."9
Did such rhetoric fall within the rights of free speech and a free press? A case can be made that it stimulated desertion from the army and resistance to the war effort. Democratic newspapers that circulated among soldiers contained many editorials proclaiming the illegality of an anti-slavery war. "You perceive that it is to emancipate slaves . . . that you are used as soldiers," declared the Dubuque Herald. "Are you, as soldiers, bound by patriotism, duty or loyalty to fight in such a cause?" Newspapers printed many alleged letters written by family members at home to soldiers in the army. "I am sorry you are engaged in this . . . unholy, unconstitutional and he
llish war," a father supposedly wrote to his son, "which has no other purpose but to free the negroes and enslave the whites." Another letter advised an Illinois soldier "to come home, if you have to desert, you will be protected—the people are so enraged that you need not be alarmed if you hear of the whole of our Northwest killing off the abolitionists."10 Such propaganda had its intended effect. So many members of two southern Illinois regiments deserted "rather than help free the slaves" that General Grant had to disband the regiments. Soldiers from several other regiments allowed themselves to be captured so they could be paroled and sent home.11
Equally serious were the actions of the newly elected Democratic legislatures of Indiana and Illinois. The lower houses in both states passed resolutions calling for an armistice and a peace conference. Both lower houses also demanded retraction of the "wicked, inhuman and unholy" Emancipation Proclamation as the price for continued state support of the war. When the two legislatures began work on bills to take control of state troops away from the Republican governors (elected in 1860), these governors decided to act. With the acquiescence of the Lincoln administration, Richard Yates of Illinois used an obscure clause of the state constitution to prorogue the legislature in June 1863. Though a
9. Cox, "Puritanism in Politics," Eight Years in Congress, 283; John Reynolds quoted in Gray, Hidden Civil War, 115; Samuel Medary quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War (Chicago, 1967), 77.
10. Quotations from Gray, Hidden Civil War, 122, 133.
11. Nevins, War, II, 290; Bruce Catton, Glory Road: The Bloody Route from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg (Garden City, N.Y., 1952), 246; O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 5, p.
state court found that he had exceeded his authority, the court could not itself order the legislature back into session. Indiana's iron-willed Oliver P. Morton simply persuaded Republican legislators to absent themselves, thereby forcing the legislature into adjournment for lack of a quorum. For the next two years Morton ran the state without a legislature—and without the usual appropriations. He borrowed from banks and businesses, levied contributions on Republican counties, and drew $250,000 from a special service fund in the War Department—all quite extralegal, if not illegal. But Republicans everywhere endorsed the principle of Morton's action: the Constitution must be stretched in order to save constitutional government from destruction by rebellion.12
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