A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans

by Michael Farquhar

  In March 1862, Rose was brought up on charges of espionage. The prisoner was defiant throughout the hearing. “If I gave the information you say I have,” she taunted, “I must have got it from sources that were in the confidence of the government…. If Mr. Lincoln’s friends will pour into my ear such important information, am I to be held responsible for all that?” With little accomplished at the hearing, and a formal trial thought to be too incendiary, the judge decided it would be best to exile the prisoner from Washington. He sent her south with the pledge not to return during the course of the war. She left the Old Capitol Prison draped in a Confederate flag, and when she arrived in Richmond, she was greeted as a hero by the local elite. “Had Madame Greenhow been sent South immediately after her arrest,” opined The New York Times, “we should have heard no more of the deeds of Secesh women which she has made the fashion.”

  After a brief stay in Richmond, Greenhow was sent to Europe by Jefferson Davis to generate vitally needed support for the Confederacy. “It was highly unusual, perhaps unprecedented, for a president to send a woman to represent her country in a foreign land, even in an unofficial capacity,” writes Rose’s biographer Ann Blackman. Napoléon III and Queen Victoria both received her, and, according to Blackman, she “buttonholed anyone who would listen to her arguments for recognition and her defense of slavery.” Her book, My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington, was published in Britain, where it became a bestseller.

  Tragedy struck, however, as Greenhow returned home in 1864. Her ship ran aground along the North Carolina coast, and Rose, fearing capture by Union ships blockading the area, demanded that she be taken ashore in a smaller boat. The ship’s captain reluctantly agreed to let her go, despite a raging storm, and she carried with her several small mailbags, presumed to be secret dispatches from Europe, as well as a large quantity of gold. But the little boat capsized in the darkness and rough surf, and Rose Greenhow was lost. Her body subsequently washed ashore and was found by a Confederate soldier, who discovered the gold and snatched it before pushing the body back into the water. When the corpse was rediscovered and identified, the soldier was reportedly overwhelmed by guilt and returned the gold.

  Rose O’Neale Greenhow was buried with full Confederate military honors in Wilmington, North Carolina. The inscription on her tomb reads in part: “A bearer of dispatches to the Confederate Government.”

  “Her death,” wrote Ishbel Ross, “had the epic touch in which she herself would have gloried.”

  15

  Clement L. Vallandigham: Copperhead

  Several hours past midnight on May 4, 1863, a contingent of soldiers from the 115th Ohio made their way along the darkened streets of Dayton to the home of Clement L. Vallandigham, two-term U.S. congressman and relentless critic of President Abraham Lincoln. Three days earlier, Vallandigham had appeared at a Democratic rally in Mount Vernon, Ohio, where, before a wildly cheering crowd, he denounced the tyrannical rule of “King Lincoln” and his aggressive war policies that were designed, he claimed, to liberate the black man and enslave whites. By delivering the fiery speech, the former congressman deliberately defied an order recently issued by General Ambrose Burnside, which stated in part that “the habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy will no longer be tolerated in this department [Ohio].” Now Burnside’s men were about to deliver the general’s response to Vallandigham’s remarks.

  Upon reaching the residence at 323 First Street, the soldiers quickly cordoned off the property. Captain Charles G. Hutton then rang the doorbell. Vallandigham appeared at an upstairs bedroom window in his nightshirt and demanded to know what the soldiers wanted. Hutton informed him that he was to be arrested under orders from General Burnside and suggested that he surrender peacefully. “If Burnside wants me,” Vallandigham shouted scornfully, “let him come up here and take me.”

  Several more requests to come downstairs were ignored. Instead, Vallandigham shouted for the police and insisted he wasn’t properly dressed. Hutton assured him that he would be given time to make himself presentable, but still Vallandigham resisted. Finally the captain ordered his men to force open the front door. As they attacked it with bars and axes, Vallandigham fired three pistol shots out of his window in a final attempt to alert the police or sympathetic neighbors. It was in vain. Hutton and his men succeeded in entering the home through the back door and felt their way in the darkness to the second floor, where Vallandigham had barricaded himself behind two bedroom doors. After smashing through both, the soldiers found the former congressman standing in the middle of the room, his wife and sister-in-law both cowering behind him and shrieking in terror.

  “You have now broken open my house and overpowered me,” Vallandigham said sarcastically, “and I am obliged to surrender.” With that he was led away to face trial and a most unusual sentence, decreed by Lincoln himself: banishment to the Confederate States of America.

  Vallandigham’s arrest came at a time when Lincoln faced fierce resistance from many Democrats in the North, the most rabid of whom were known derisively as “Copperheads.” They vigorously opposed the president’s prosecution of the war, his emancipation policies, and the powers he took upon himself to suppress rebellion, such as the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Lincoln despaired of these malcontent Copperheads, who, he believed, undermined the Union and in some cases actively conspired against it. “The enemy behind us,” he said in frustration during the grim winter of 1862–63, “is more dangerous to the country than the enemy before us.”

  Of all the president’s foes within the Union, Vallandigham was among the most prominent. His sharp attacks against Lincoln and the war began while he still served in the U.S. House of Representatives. “The Richmond Government could not have planted a readier spokesman than it had in Congress at Washington in Clement L. Vallandigham,” wrote Lincoln’s biographer Carl Sandburg. The new president had barely taken the oath of office before Vallandigham pounced on his inauguration speech. “It was not written in the straightforward language expected from the plain, blunt honest man of the Northwest,” he declared, “but with the forked tongue and crooked counsel of the New York politician [William H. Seward], leaving thirty millions of people in doubt whether it meant peace or war.”

  Civil conflict was an anathema to the congressman, even in the face of secession. The Union could never be preserved by bloody coercion, he stated repeatedly, and insisted that he would never “vote one dollar of money whereby one drop of American blood should be shed in a civil war.” In a blundering effort to avoid war and preserve the Union, Vallandigham proposed to amend the Constitution by dividing the nation into four sections, giving each area a veto on the passage of any law or the elections of presidents or vice presidents, and allowing each state the right of secession on certain specified terms. It was a supremely unworkable solution, worthy of a man who, according to his biographer, Frank L. Klement, “possessed a self-confidence bordering on audacity.” With his silly idea shelved and the nation violently divided, Vallandigham’s only recourse was to prick the government at every opportunity.

  On January 14, 1863, after nearly two years of civil conflict and shortly before he left office in defeat, Vallandigham took to the floor of the House and delivered his most impassioned speech yet against the war and the president who waged it. “Tall, bearded, sonerous, he was,” Sandburg wrote, “his self-righteousness gave him personal exaltation; he was chosen to be the vocal instrument of absolute justice.” For nearly two hours the Chosen One spoke, declaring that Lincoln’s effort to restore the Union by force was an “utter, disastrous, and most bloody failure,” and insisting that immediate peace, with the aim of eventual reunion, was the only solution.

  “On the 14th of April [1861] I believed that coercion would bring on war, and war disunion,” he told the assembled congressmen and other observers. “More than that, I believed, what you all in your hearts believe today, that the South could never be conquered—never. And not that only
, but I was satisfied…that the secret but real purpose of the war was to abolish slavery in the States…and with it…the change of our present democratical form of government into an imperial despotism…. I do not support the war; and today I bless God that not the smell of so much as one drop of blood is upon my garments…. Our Southern brethren were to be whipped back into love and fellowship at the point of the bayonet. Oh, monstrous delusion!”

  Reaction to Vallandigham’s speech was ferocious, both in Congress and in many Republican newspapers. “The people of the Northwest spurn him,” wrote Isaac Jackson Allen of the Ohio State Journal, “and spit upon his detestable dogma.” But there were some, particularly in Vallandigham’s home state of Ohio, who celebrated what he had to say. “It is a speech,” wrote James J. Faran in the Cincinnati Enquirer, “which would add to the fame of a Clay, or a Webster, or a Burke, or a Chatham.”

  The enthusiastic response to Vallandigham in the Midwest reflected the discontent many of its Democrats felt about the war, which had taken an enormous human and economic toll on the region, and especially about the Emancipation Proclamation that they feared would result in a disastrous influx of freed slaves. “Ohio,” one Copperhead wrote, “will be overrun with negroes, they will compete with you and bring down your wages, you will have to work with them, eat with them, your wives and children must associate with theirs and your families will be degraded to their level.” The anti-administration sentiment ran so strong in the region that John A. McClernand, a leading Illinois Democrat, warned Lincoln in 1863 of “the rising storm in the Middle and Northwestern States,” and predicted “not only a separation from the New England States but reunion of the Middle and Northwestern States with the revolted [Southern] States.”

  The president was inclined to believe such threats and moved to suppress dissent he considered dangerous. It was in this unsettled atmosphere that General Burnside, commander of the Department of the Ohio, issued General Order No. 38—an ill-conceived measure made by a man still smarting from his crushing defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg and suffering from a scorching case of diarrhea. The order prohibited not only acts that benefited the enemy, which was reasonable enough, but also stated that treason, “express or implied,” would not be tolerated. This was a far-reaching clause that, Lincoln biographers John Nicolay and John Hay wrote, “may be made to embrace, in its ample sweep, any demonstration not to the taste of the general in command.” The order, with its disturbing constitutional implications, caused an immediate uproar—even among loyal Republicans. One of Burnside’s own staff officers warned President Lincoln that the general’s order had “kindled the fires of hatred and contention.” Clement Vallandigham was determined to defy it.

  On May 1, 1863, he delivered the speech that doomed him to exile. Along with his usual rhetorical lashes against Lincoln, the war, and abolition, Vallandigham declared that Burnside’s General Order No. 38 was a base usurpation of arbitrary power that he despised, spat upon, and trampled under his feet. Standing among the crowd roaring its approval, two of Burnside’s men, dressed as civilians, took careful notes on the address. Three days later Vallandigham was arrested at his home in Dayton and taken by train to a military prison in Cincinnati. From his cell he issued a widely published statement to the Democrats of Ohio:

  I am here in a military bastile for no other offense than my political opinions, and the defense of them, and the rights of the people, and of your constitutional liberties. Speeches made in the hearing of thousands of you, in denunciation of the usurpation of power, infractions of the Constitution and the laws, and of military despotism, were the causes of my arrest and imprisonment. I am a Democrat—for the Constitution, for law, for Union, for liberty—this is my only crime.

  While Vallandigham wrote from Cincinnati, riots broke out in Dayton. The offices of the Dayton Journal, a Republican newspaper, were torched; in the resulting inferno a number of other businesses were also destroyed. And the outrage wasn’t limited to Ohio. Editorials across the nation condemned the arrest. The New York Atlas, a Democratic paper, asserted that “the tyranny of military despotism” exhibited in Burnside’s actions demonstrated “the weakness, folly, oppression, mismanagement and general wickedness of the administration at Washington.” A huge protest rally was held in New York, during which one speaker warned that if Vallandigham’s arrest wasn’t rebuked, “free speech dies, and with it our liberty, the Constitution and our country.” Another pointedly noted that Vallandigham hadn’t spoken out against the war nearly as vociferously as Lincoln had against the Mexican-American War when he was a congressman.

  Several days after his arrest, Vallandigham was brought before a military commission that he insisted had no right to try him. He was not part of the land or naval forces of the United States, he said, nor in the militia; therefore he was subject only to the civil courts. Furthermore, he asserted that the alleged offense itself was not known to the Constitution, or to any law. “The Vallandigham case did indeed raise troubling constitutional questions,” writes historian James M. McPherson. “Could a speech be treason? Could a military court try a civilian? Did a general, or for that matter a president, have the power to impose martial law or suspend habeas corpus in an arena distant from military operations where the civil courts were functioning? These questions went to the heart of the administration’s policy for dealing with fire in the rear.”

  The military tribunal was seemingly untroubled by these constitutional concerns. Vallandigham was convicted and sentenced to close confinement in a fortress of Burnside’s choosing. His lawyers immediately applied to the U.S. Circuit Court for a writ of habeas corpus, which was denied. Burnside himself had sent a written statement to the court in which he argued against the writ and defended the actions he had taken against Vallandigham: “If I were to find a man from the enemy’s country distributing in my camp speeches of their public men that tended to demoralize the troops, or to destroy their confidence in the constituted authorities of the Government, I would have him tried and hung, if found guilty, and all the rules of modern warfare would sustain me. Why should such speeches from our own public men be allowed?”

  The quick succession of Vallandigham’s arrest, trial, and sentence took President Lincoln “somewhat by surprise,” according to his biographers Nicolay and Hay, “and it was only after these proceedings were consummated that he had an opportunity to seriously consider the case.” The historians concluded that the president would probably not have allowed the events to go forward had he been consulted in advance. As it stood, though, Lincoln was determined to support Burnside; to do less, he believed, would only encourage the subversive elements in the Northwest. The president declined the general’s offer to resign in the midst of the uproar surrounding the case. “When I shall wish to supersede you I will let you know,” he wrote to Burnside. “All the Cabinet regretted the necessity of arresting…Vallandigham, some doubting there was a real necessity for it; but, being done, all were for seeing you through with it.”

  Though Lincoln upheld Burnside, he went against the general’s advice and commuted Vallandigham’s sentence from imprisonment to banishment behind enemy lines. This, he believed, would remove an irksome martyr around whom the Copperheads could rally. Thus, under order of the president, Vallandigham was escorted to the headquarters of General William S. Rosencrans in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and from there into the hands of the Confederates.

  “Why, sir, do you know that unless I protect you with a guard my soldiers will tear you to pieces in an instant?” Rosencrans reportedly said to Vallandigham.

  “That, sir, is because they are just as ignorant of my character as yourself,” the prisoner responded, his considerable self-regard still very much intact. “But, General, I do have a proposition to make. Draw your soldiers up in a hollow square tomorrow morning, and announce to them that Vallandigham desires to vindicate himself, and I will guarantee that when they have heard me through they will be more willing to tear Lincoln and yourself
to pieces than they will Vallandigham.”

  The exile received a mixed reception in the South. Many welcomed him for what he represented. “The Government in Richmond saw it as a promise of counter-revolution in the North,” wrote Nicolay and Hay, “and some of the Confederate generals built upon it the rosiest hopes for future campaigns.” But because Vallandigham maintained his allegiance to the United States and his desire for reunion, some viewed him as an enemy of Southern independence who had no place in their midst. “Unless he intends to renounce his allegiance to our enemies,” wrote one editor of the Richmond Sentinel, “he owes it to himself and us not to stay here.”

  As it turned out, Vallandigham had no intention of staying. When Confederate president Jefferson Davis requested a formal statement of his “guest’s” intent and status, Vallandigham replied that he was in the South under compulsion and wished to leave. “My most earnest desire is for a passport, if necessary, and permission to leave as soon as possible through some Confederate port…for Canada, where I can see my family, and as far as possible, transact my business unmolested.” His wish was granted; after just twenty-four days in the Confederacy, he was on a ship that managed to avoid a Union blockade and take him to Bermuda. From there he sailed to Canada.

  While Vallandigham was maneuvering his way out of the South, in the North Lincoln continued to face hostile Democrats and even some loyal Republicans. It was an era when presidents, by tradition, did not directly court public opinion, but, writes historian David Herbert Donald, “by mid-summer of 1863, it was desperately important that the administration’s policies should be understood. On no issue was this need so great as on the abrogation of civil liberties.” The president had been waiting for an appropriate time to address his critics, and found it when a group of New York Democrats sent him a series of stinging resolutions they had adopted in Albany that strongly condemned the treatment of Vallandigham. It was, they declared, a “blow…against the spirit of our law and Constitution” and an assault on “the liberty of speech and of the press, the right of trial by jury, the law of evidence, and the privilege of habeas corpus.”