Breckenridge returned to his command and related the orders to his brigade commanders. One of these brigades was an eclectic mix of volunteer units from Kentucky. These men were volunteers who formed the First Kentucky Brigade, more popularly known as the Orphan Brigade. They had been thus named due to the fact that Kentucky was initially neutral, forcing supporters of the Confederacy to enlist in nearby Tennessee. General Roger W. Hanson, commander of the Orphan Brigade, exploded with rage when he heard the orders from Breckenridge. If Bragg insisted on murdering his own troops, he threatened, Hanson would kill him first. Breckenridge and another officer had to physically restrain Hanson until he calmed down. The men were instructed to advance rapidly to within a hundred yards of the enemy, fire, then claw their way through the underbrush, and finally attack their opponents with bayonets. The Union gunners were ready with fifty-seven cannons in position by four in the afternoon to meet the expected onslaught.
Nicholas Anderson and his Sixth Ohio stood in the rear of four lines of battle when Breckenridge’s attack began. The Confederates ran across the fields and hurled themselves into the Union lines. Sergeant Samuel Welch of the Fifty-First Ohio described the simultaneous first volleys. “It seemed to me that both lines . . . were annihilated,” Welch observed, as dozens of men from either side fell. The Union soldiers fled “like blackbirds,” according to Jervis D. Grainger of the Sixth Kentucky Infantry. The men had to cross the icy river sixty feet wide and two feet deep, then scale a twenty-foot limestone bluff with enemy bullets striking the rocks as they climbed. “My idea was that the Army of the Cumberland was rapidly passing out of existence,” Welch recalled. When the beleaguered bluecoats finally crested the riverbank, they found Negley’s reinforcements waiting there to aid them.6
Major General Thomas L. Crittenden, commander of the Union left wing, relied on his chief of artillery, Major John Mendenhall, to time the firing of the cannons. They waited until as many of the Confederates were exposed in the open field as possible before all fifty-seven guns fired at once. The result, according to Colonel Charles Anderson, was “the most stupendous and continuous fire of artillery . . . in a small space ever heard on this continent.” In just a few minutes the rebels lost an astounding eighteen hundred men.7
Negley’s and Hazen’s brigades then crossed the river and began a counterattack against Breckenridge’s decimated division. Grose’s brigade, including Nicholas Anderson’s Sixth Ohio, also moved forward against Breckenridge’s right flank. For the first time in the Battle of Stones River, a large portion of the Confederate army was in retreat under withering fire. Just two hours after Breckenridge’s attack, the Union Army had advanced to the enemy’s original breastworks. Two more hours of sharp fighting finally dislodged the rebels from their trenches, forcing them to retire. Rosecrans’s left wing pulled back into a defensive position before nightfall. It was a stunning turn of events.
The Battle of Stones River was over. The Northern press was ecstatic at the result. The editor of the Louisville Journal wrote that the Rosecrans name was famous before but “had now become immortal.” The timing could not have been better for the Lincoln administration. The president’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day had transformed the conflict into a virtual holy war. Although it angered many in Ohio and other northern states, Lincoln’s groundbreaking executive order effectively ended Confederate hopes for assistance from Britain or France. The military victory also opened the door to an eventual invasion of the South from Nashville through Chattanooga and into Georgia. “God bless you and all with you,” Lincoln gushed. He later told Rosecrans, “You gave us a hard-earned victory, which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over.” For the soldiers the end of the battle was hardly a cause for celebration. Close to nineteen thousand men in blue and gray lay dead or wounded. Heaps of body parts piled up outside field hospitals and unburied corpses stiffened on the battlefield. Both armies felt eviscerated and needed time to recover physically and mentally from the terrible experience.8
Anderson wrote to his eldest daughter from the newly named Camp Sill, on the east side of Stones River, that evening. Although his wounds were minor, the pain was real and kept him awake at night. His persistent fever caused his doctor to fear that he might have contracted typhoid fever. He sent his suit of clothes to his daughters “marred as you see by the traitors,” but the torn and bloody uniform was later stolen from a holding area at Nashville. Rumors swirled around the camp that the enemy had retreated south more than fifty miles to Fayetteville, Tennessee. Others speculated that Bragg had been reinforced by Major General James Longstreet and was preparing for another great battle. In reality, Bragg was making yet another escape to lick his wounds and ponder how such a promising tactical triumph had devolved into a bloody strategic defeat.
For the next ten days, as Anderson recovered in camp two miles south of Murfreesboro, the press and other pundits were busy critiquing the performance of the principal leaders of both armies. Anderson was not as critical of McCook as others. The attack had been a complete surprise after all, he reasoned. “What more could he do?” Anderson asked. Bragg’s plan was excellent, he admitted, but the rebels “unaccountably failed in vigor in following it up.” What Anderson did admit, and what McCook’s critics were quick in pointing out, was the fact that the Union right wing was spread too wide and too thin, with no real reserves and no natural shields on its right flank. But Anderson was being too kind to his friend. If Sheridan had been in McCook’s place, the entire right wing of the Army of the Cumberland would have been up and ready at four in the morning. Countless lives might have been saved.9
On January 7, Rosecrans approached Anderson about the reorganization of the army. He suggested that Anderson might consider commanding a brigade. Anderson put him off. Nothing would be happening any time soon, Anderson figured, so he requested leave to go home and recuperate. He made a brief speech to his old comrades at the Ohio State House on January 13, but the effort only fatigued him further. Unsure of his ability to return to the field, Anderson resigned his commission on February 21, 1863. He left the job of leading the Ninety-Third Ohio Infantry to his capable second-in-command, thirty-four-year-old Hiram Strong. Strong was anxious to prove himself worthy of the challenge, as he had missed the Battle of Stones River due to pressing family business back home. Anderson’s retirement may have saved his own life, but Strong would fall just a few months later, mortally wounded while commanding the Ninety-Third Ohio at Chickamauga.10
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Dangerous Man
AS SPRING 1863 APPROACHED, Charles Anderson’s health took another turn for the worse. A severe case of bronchitis ebbed, but his constant adversary (asthma) returned with a vengeance. As Anderson lay in his bed back home in Dayton, an old friend and political rival was planning his next move after losing his seat in Congress that fall. The brilliant and handsome Clement L. Vallandigham had many of the same talents as Anderson, combined with one quality that his fellow attorney lacked: limitless ambition.
Val, as nearly everyone called him, had known Anderson on the judicial circuit and later in the Ohio state legislature. He had worked harder than Anderson and had become one of the leading attorneys in Dayton. He had also become an immensely popular leader among Ohio Democrats. Although Anderson was a devoted Henry Clay Whig, the political differences between the two charismatic men did not prevent them from becoming close friends. When Vallandigham’s son Willie died suddenly in 1848, he was overwhelmed with grief. He marveled at the support he received from the local community. “Mr. Anderson was an especial comfort to us,” Vallandigham wrote to his brother, “He is an extraordinary man.”1
Unlike Anderson, however, Vallandigham was a man of humble birth and few resources. The cemetery plot where his son lay was the only piece of ground on earth that he owned when he buried the boy. Edwin M. Stanton, who later became Lincoln’s secretary of war, recognized the potential in the young attorney
and lent him five hundred dollars to open a law practice. Like Anderson, Vallandigham possessed a superior intellect and was well-read and fervently self-righteous. He and Anderson reviled the abolitionist extremists for playing their part in driving the country toward disunion; but Vallandigham lacked the perspective that Anderson had gained from his intimate experiences with the Southern conspirators. As war neared, their differences grew and the friendship ended.
Vallandigham was ever conscious of an opportunity to steal the spotlight in order to promote himself and his political opinions. When he learned of John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, he rushed to the scene. One of his colleagues in Congress heard of the visit and called Vallandigham a “pettifogging inquisitor.” The Cincinnati Commercial derided Vallandigham’s questioning that “probed among Brown’s wounds for material with which to manufacture political capital.” Vallandigham made the convincing argument that Brown was a terrorist who deserved to hang. He chastised abolition enthusiasts such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who attempted to canonize Brown. Society is based on the rule of law, Vallandigham insisted. No high moral principles could justify outright murder.
If Brown’s raid was the spark that might light the fire of disunion and civil war, then Vallandigham was determined to extinguish it. In the lively discussions that followed in the Thirty-Fifth Congress, he made a landmark speech that defined his position as the leader of the antiwar movement, while exacerbating sectional rivalries in a unique way. It was an intensely partisan oration. Vallandigham blamed the Republicans for forming a party along sectional lines to further agitate the differences between North and South. Northern radicals, he argued, were trampling the Constitution and its purposeful balance between the interests of free and slave states. Making Brown into a martyr, Vallandigham reasoned, meant placing abolitionist doctrine above the sacred law of the land. This was an odious notion on its face. It was certainly no reason to break up the Union and risk commencing a devastating civil war.
While Vallandigham preached unity on the one hand, the focus of his speech was the special interests of the West. He took advantage of the increased sectional tensions by pressing his own sectional agenda in Congress. Members should exercise care, Vallandigham advised, not to ignore the interest of his part of the Union. He boasted that he was “as good a Western fire eater as the hottest salamander in this House.” He would advocate for the welfare of the West, Vallandigham vowed, to his dying day. His bold proclamation of a third political section put a stake in the ground that he stood by stubbornly for the rest of his public life. Vallandigham’s Western factionalism led to unusual and dangerous proposals. By tirelessly promoting such radical ideas, he would become one of the most controversial figures of the Civil War era.
With war on the doorstep, Vallandigham and Anderson shared some common ground. Both supported the last-ditch efforts of Larz Anderson and John J. Crittenden to save the Union by extending the Missouri Compromise line westward. When those efforts failed and seven states had seceded, Vallandigham became morose. As the Union dissolved before his eyes, he compared his helpless feelings with “one who watches over the couch of his beloved mother slowly dying,” with no power to save her. When the news of Robert Anderson’s surrender of Fort Sumter reached Ohio, most citizens clamored for war. Vallandigham dug in his heels. President Lincoln and his abolition friends had brought on this war through coercion, Vallandigham maintained. Democrats should oppose the war on those grounds. Many of his friends were too busy volunteering for service to stop and listen. Vallandigham, who commanded Dayton’s militia, left his uniform hanging in his closet and stayed home while his neighbors marched off to defend their country. One local newspaper called Vallandigham “invincible in peace, invisible in war.”
The Dayton Journal urged Vallandigham to resign at once, on account of his “treasonable sentiments.” The Journal’s editor asked, “Could Jeff Davis desire a more faithful emissary than C. L. Vallandigham? Shame where is thy blush?” Vallandigham was left standing nearly alone among such well-known Ohio Democrats as Samuel S. Cox, William Allen, David Tod, and John Brough. They all rallied behind the flag. Party loyalties took a back seat to patriotism. Vallandigham stood his ground under a withering verbal assault. Lincoln’s suspension of the right of habeas corpus, his naval blockade of the Confederate States, and the raising of a huge army were extralegal measures that were not sanctioned by the Constitution, Vallandigham reasoned. The usurpation of power from the Congress was unprecedented, and Vallandigham feared that the civil liberties at the very heart of the republican ideal were therefore at risk. When Congress was asked to validate the president’s actions, the Ohio congressman vowed, “I will not vote to sustain or ratify—never.” Vallandigham promised that he would vote “millions for defense, not a dollar or a man for aggressive and offensive civil war.” The line between dissent and treason is often blurry in wartime. Vallandigham was walking a political and legal tightrope.2
Lincoln took a personal interest in ending the congressional career of Clement L. Vallandigham. Brigadier General Robert C. Schenck was also a Dayton resident, former Whig congressman, and a life-long friend of Anderson. The day after Anderson arrived from his Texas escape, Schenck wrote the president, suggesting that he give Anderson an equivalent commission. Wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run on the last day of August 1862, Schenck was recuperating at Willard’s Hotel in Washington City when Edwin M. Stanton and Salmon P. Chase paid him a visit. “You are the only man who can beat that traitor Vallandigham,” Chase pleaded. When Lincoln also visited and suggested that Schenck could do his country a greater service at the ballot box than on the battlefield, Schenck agreed to run.3
The war had lasted beyond most people’s worst dreams by the fall of 1862. Morale in the North and the West ebbed as the body count piled up with no final Union victory in sight. Not only had Braxton Bragg forced Don Carlos Buell all the way back from Alabama to Louisville, but the rebels had installed a secessionist governor in Kentucky. Vallandigham’s star was again on the ascent as the Lincoln administration took a battering in the Democratic press. A recession stoked the race-baiting techniques so commonly used by western Democrats during the previous thirty years. “If the laboring men of this state do not desire their places occupied by Negroes,” the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote on August 4, “they will vote for the nominees of the Democratic ticket.” Vallandigham acolyte Thomas O. Lowe was even cruder. “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Niggers where they are,” he wrote. The threat of a tide of cheap labor released by a future emancipation of slaves combined with war weariness to create distrust of the Lincoln administration. Dissenters, many of whom were recent Irish immigrants, also resented what they saw as moral condescension on the part of New England Puritan abolitionists and temperance crusaders. They formed the base of an informal protest group that became known as Copperheads, and Vallandigham became their political champion.
The Republican press was just as yellow as its rivals. Scurrilous rumors about Vallandigham’s supposed “treasonable plots” circulated widely in newspapers and pamphlets. Just weeks before the election, Lincoln played the war hero card by extolling Schenck’s bravery at Second Bull Run and promoting him to major general. Vallandigham lost in a rout, but Democrats throughout the Western states gained strength, winning fourteen of Ohio’s nineteen congressional seats. Anderson’s troops rejoiced when they heard the news of Vallandigham’s defeat. A straw poll of the regiment gave Schenck in excess of four hundred votes, while Vallandigham garnered fewer than a hundred. Vallandigham was not discouraged. He attributed the defeat to political shenanigans. The setback only made him more determined to get his message out and stop what he felt was a horrible mistake of a war. He could think of no better podium than the governor’s chair.4
In March 1863, Vallandigham went public with his desire to run for chief executive of his native state, an office then occupied by David Tod. Custom dictated that the nomination be gi
ven to Hugh J. Jewett, who had run unsuccessfully against Tod in the last gubernatorial contest. When Vallandigham sought the support of party leaders that spring, he was rebuffed. No matter, he told his friends, the people would support him. He published a collection of his former speeches in a campaign manifesto titled The Record of Hon. C. L. Vallandigham on Abolition, the Union, and the Civil War. Anderson, another influential man without current employment, was one of Vallandigham’s avid readers.
What Anderson read made him both angry and concerned. Vallandigham’s epistle promised to explain “why negrophilistic fanaticism includes . . . an intense hatred of Vallandigham.” The author repeated his claim that the North was the sole aggressor in the conflict. Vallandigham reasoned that the slavery question, a purely political issue in the South, had motivated moral and religious zealots in the North to overstep their bounds. Slavery was the South’s problem to deal with. This was the same state sovereignty argument asserted by many Southerners. Vallandigham professed a “serene indifference” to the peculiar institution. The most important object, he preached, was to return the Union and the Constitution to where it was prior to the rebellion. Vallandigham’s conservative verbiage at the beginning of his tome eventually gave way to radical proposals to reform the Union into a confederation of three coequal sections.
The Lost Gettysburg Address Page 15