Many Western Unionists shared that foreboding, and they passed along their fears to the President. John A. McClernand, a sturdy Illinois Democrat, warned the President 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 States.” Republicans were even more alarmed, finding “Treason... everywhere bold, defiant—and active, with impunity!” In Illinois the Democratic majority in the state legislature insisted that the Union could not be restored unless Lincoln withdrew the Emancipation Proclamation and urged him to declare an armistice; they also tried to appoint delegates to the Louisville peace convention, to block arbitrary arrests, and to prohibit the immigration of blacks into the state. Republican Governor Richard Yates felt obliged to prorogue the legislature, for the first time in history, and to rule without legislative authorization. Similarly in Indiana the Democrats who controlled the legislature threatened to take over control of the state’s military efforts; they were blocked only when the Republican members, bolting the chamber to prevent a quorum, brought about adjournment before any appropriations bills could be passed. For the next two years Republican Governor Oliver P. Morton governed the state without legislative authorization. Both governors attributed Democratic obduracy to secret, pro-Confederate organizations, especially the Knights of the Golden Circle, which were allegedly fomenting disloyalty throughout the West.
Lincoln credited these reports of discontents and conspiracies. Governor Yates, whom he had known for many years, had his entire confidence, but he was not quite so ready to believe Morton, who, he said, was “at times ... the skeeredest man I know of.” When the governor urged him to meet him in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to confer on the crisis, Lincoln refused, because the absence of both the President of the United States and the Governor of Indiana from their respective capitals would be “misconstrued a thousand ways.” Nevertheless, he read attentively Morton’s long report, drafted by the reformer Robert Dale Owen, detailing the activities of secret peace societies in the West and revealing the Democratic plan to end the war, recognize the Confederacy, and organize a new nation with the New England states left out. All such news the President found exceedingly troubling. He never realized that most of the supposedly disloyal agitation in the West was less an expression of hostility to the Union or the war than to the Republican party. Deeply worried, he confided to Charles Sumner that he now feared “‘the fire in the rear’—meaning the Democracy especially at the North West—more than our military chances.”
Promptly his administration moved to support the loyal Republican regimes in the West and to stamp out disaffection and discontent. In January, Yates informed him that it was imperative to have four well-armed regiments stationed in Illinois in order to keep an eye on the legislature and disperse it if necessary, and the President promptly endorsed the proposal. When Morton, who was trying to govern in the absence of the state legislature, ran out of money, Stanton was able to find $250,000 for him in the budget of the Union War Department.
The administration employed the new conscription law not merely to raise troops but to suppress dissent. Lincoln named Colonel James B. Fry provost marshal, and assistant provost marshals were assigned to each state, where they worked closely with the governors. Their primary duty was to enroll soldiers, but if they encountered opposition, as they did in many parts of the West, they promptly jailed the disaffected, invoking Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to deny them trial. Newspapers that attacked the government too vigorously or tried to discourage enlistments were suppressed, sometimes for a single issue, sometimes for a longer period.
Lincoln had the bad judgment to put Ambrose E. Burnside in charge of his effort to keep the West loyal to the Union. Fresh from his defeat at Fredericksburg, Burnside, as commander of the Department of the Ohio, was determined that no carelessness or oversight on his part should lead to further disaster, and he energetically fought what he considered “treason, expressed or implied.” On April 13 he issued General Order No. 38 announcing that anyone who committed “acts for the benefit of the enemies of our country” would be arrested and tried as a spy or traitor. The order specifically prohibited “the habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy.”
Vallandigham, the leading Peace Democrat in the West, resolved to test this order, which clearly violated the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, and on May 1 he made a bitter, rousing address at Mount Vernon, Ohio, denouncing Burnside’s order as a base usurpation of tyrannical power. He attacked the President as “King Lincoln,” who was waging war for the liberation of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites. Four days later Burnside had him arrested, and a military commission promptly found him guilty of “declaring disloyal sentiments and opinions with the object and purpose of weakening the power of the Government in its efforts to suppress an unlawful rebellion.” The former congressman was sentenced to close confinement in a United States fortress for the duration of the war.
Vallandigham’s arrest and trial posed a dangerous problem for Lincoln. His instinctive judgment was to sustain the action of his subordinate in the field. Burnside had sent a copy of his Order No. 38 to Washington, and neither Halleck nor the President disapproved of it. After all, the general was acting under the authority of the President’s own proclamation of September 24, 1862, suspending the writ of habeas corpus. That authority was further strengthened by a recent act of Congress, which—depending on the legislator’s interpretation—either granted the President authority to suspend the great writ or affirmed that he already had the authority. Accordingly, on May 8, Lincoln telegraphed Burnside his “kind assurance of support” in the Vallandigham arrest.
On reflection, he came to view the arrest in another light. All the cabinet regretted the necessity of arresting Vallandigham, and some doubted that there really was a necessity. Gideon Welles judged bluntly: “It was an error on the part of Burnside.” Within the administration there was unhappiness that the ex-congressman had been tried before a military tribunal, even though the civil courts in Ohio were available. David Davis, now a justice of the Supreme Court, repeatedly hammered on the theme that military trials in these circumstances were unconstitutional and wrong, and he capitalized on the President’s own known opposition to such military tribunals. As Halleck wrote Burnside, “in the loyal States like Ohio it is best to interfere with the ordinary civil tribunals as little as possible.” Others regretted that Vallandigham had been sentenced to imprisonment, rather than to banishment to the Confederate lines.
The dismay over Burnside’s actions within the administration was nothing when compared to the furor of anger the arrest of Vallandigham roused in the country. The rabidly Democratic New York Atlas set the tone by declaring that “the tyranny of military despotism” exhibited in the arrest of Vallandigham demonstrated “the weakness, folly, oppression, mismanagement and general wickedness of the administration at Washington.” At a huge rally in New York City one speaker asserted that if Vallandigham’s arrest went unrebuked, “free speech dies, and with it our liberty, the constitution and our country.” Another pointedly reminded the President that Vallandigham’s speech was not nearly so strong as Lincoln’s own denunciation of President Polk in the Mexican War. Still another shouted that “the man who occupied the Presidential chair at Washington was tenfold a greater traitor to the country than was any Southern rebel.” Across the country newspapers, many of unquestioned loyalty, assailed the arrest of Vallandigham and joined the New York Herald in fearing that it was only the first of “a series of fatal steps which must terminate at last in bloody anarchy.”
Bowing to pressure, Lincoln on May 19, against the advice of General Burnside, commuted Vallandigham’s sentence and ordered that the ex-congressman be exiled to the Confederacy.
The Vallandigham affair had a chastening effect on Lincoln. On June 1, when Burnside ordered the strongly antiwar Chicago Times su
spended, the President immediately overruled him. Though the paper, edited by Wilbur F. Storey, had strongly condemned the administration’s emancipation policy as “a monstrous usurpation, a criminal wrong, and an act of national suicide” and said the President was sacrificing soldiers’ lives without cause, Lincoln said the irritation produced by suppressing the newspaper would do more harm than its publication.
But the damage resulting from the Vallandigham case was too extensive to be erased. Ohio Democrats showed what they thought of the President by nominating Vallandigham for governor though he was still in exile. More important, the episode had a profound effect on the War Democrats. Their most prominent spokesman, Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, denounced the arrest as an offense “against our most sacred rights” and warned that the administration was moving toward revolution and military despotism.
IV
Seymour’s speech killed hopes of a political realignment that would have created a centrist party consisting of most Republicans and War Democrats. Talk of such a realignment had been in the air for months. Indeed, in the fall elections of 1862 in several states Republicans, aware that they had been a minority party in 1860, and Democrats, self-conscious because they had in the past been aligned with the South, joined in putting forward “Union” tickets. The fusion was incomplete and unsuccessful, but the idea of a reordering of the parties persisted.
One version of realignment was promoted by the Francis Preston Blair family, which was powerful in the border states. Pushed primarily by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, this scheme called for the President to reorganize his cabinet, eliminating both Seward and Stanton, and to restore McClellan to command of the armies. Francis Preston Blair, Sr., was to become “the private counsellor—not to say dictator—of the President” because, Montgomery Blair said, his father was “beyond all question, the ablest and best informed politician in America.” The plan went nowhere; as Attorney General Bates sourly noted, the Blairs believed “fully in trick and contrivance” and mistook cunning for wisdom.
The schemes of conservative New York Republicans like Thurlow Weed made more sense. Continuing to blame their defeat in the 1862 election on Horace Greeley and the abolitionists, one of Weed’s associates developed plans for “a speedy sloughing off of the secession sympathizers from the Dem[ocratic] party, of the ultras from the Republicans] and a new organization for 1864.” Many thought the best scenario was for Seward to step forward as the voice of moderation, the spokesman of Conservative Republicans and loyal Democrats, making himself available as a candidate in the next presidential election. But Seward would have no part in the plan. To be sure, he had differences with the President, for he had not favored emancipation and regarded Lincoln’s proclamations as “unfortunate” and “pernicious,” but he was loyal. When approached, he eulogized Lincoln “without limitation” and let it be known that he thought the President “the best and wisest man he has ever known.”
Another way of bringing about a realignment would be to have the conservative Republicans and border-state men who supported Lincoln join forces with the Democrats who backed Horatio Seymour. After all, Seymour, though a vigorous critic of the administration, was no Copperhead. So attractive was this idea that, in January, Thurlow Weed, much to Lincoln’s surprise, gave up the editorship of the influential Albany Evening Journal in order to promote it. Free from obligations to his party, he could resist what he called the “Fanaticism” of Greeley and the abolitionists, which, if unchecked, was bound to “end our Union and Government.” Weed’s alienation was so public that Vice President Hamlin predicted that he was joining the Democrats.
Lincoln himself was not above giving a slight nudge to this plan to build a party of the center. In January he attempted to enlist Governor Seymour’s support for the measures of the administration. Reminding the governor’s brother, John, that he and Seymour had the same stake in the preservation of the Union, he observed that if the Union was broken, there would be no “next President” of the United States, whether Republican or Democratic. He listened sympathetically to John Seymour’s complaints against “some of the Republican party who claimed to have a patent right for all the patriotism.” Because Lincoln understood Seymour’s importance as “the head of the greatest State” in the nation, he also initiated a direct correspondence with the governor, “chiefly,” as he said, “that we may become better acquainted.” Cleverly assuming that he and the governor agreed on the importance of “maintaining the nation’s life, and integrity,” he sought to minimize differences and to eliminate “unjust suspicions on one side or the other.” Though Seymour, fearing a trap, cagily delayed a reply for more than three weeks, he eventually responded, in his ponderous way, that he intended “to show to those charged with the administration of public affairs a due deference and respect and to yield them a just and generous support in all measures.. .within the scope of their constitutional powers.” Lincoln refused to be put off, and in the following months took great care to see that even the governor’s minor requests for patronage were promptly and courteously attended to.
Out of this stately mating dance emerged the story that the President, using Weed as intermediary, promised to support the governor for the Union nomination as his successor in 1864 if Seymour backed the administration’s efforts to suppress the rebellion. As is usually the case with such rumors, the story was greatly exaggerated. After all, it was not within Lincoln’s power to give Seymour the succession even in the unlikely event that he decided not to run for a second term. Neither Lincoln nor Seymour made any record of this offer, if one was ever extended, and Weed’s own words did not substantiate the usual story. “Governor Seymour... can wheel the Democratic party into line, put down rebellion, and preserve the government,” was what the editor later remembered the President as saying. “Tell him for me, that if he will render this service to his country, I shall cheerfully make way for him as my successor.” This was not an offer on Lincoln’s part to withdraw from the presidential race in Seymour’s favor. It was, instead, simply a prediction, as Lincoln told Weed, that if the governor used his power “against the Rebellion and for his Country, he would be our next President.”
But all hope of enlisting Seymour as an ally, or as a confederate in a realignment of parties, was shattered by the Vallandigham case. War Democrats fell into disarray, and leadership in the party fell into the hands of leaders who were strongly opposed to Lincoln.
V
Simultaneously opposition to the President was mounting within his own party. Notwithstanding Lincoln’s success in handling the cabinet crisis of December 1862, some Republicans continued to believe that the administration needed thorough reorganization and new leadership.
Congress, which had assembled in December 1862, was a center of anti-Lincoln agitation. It was a lame-duck session, and many of the Republican representatives, serving their final terms, felt embittered toward an administration they considered responsible for their defeat in the fall elections. Conservative Congressmen from the border states and from the southern parts of the Northwest blamed Republican losses on the President’s emancipation policy; Radicals from New England, parts of the mid-Atlantic states, and the northern districts of the Old Northwest attributed defeat to Lincoln’s slowness to move against slavery. Neither faction trusted the President. Visiting Washington in January, former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin R. Curtis reported general agreement on “the utter incompetence of the Pres[iden]t,” adding: “He is shattered, dazed and utterly foolish. It would not surprise me if he were to destroy himself.” Conservative Republicans thought that he had unnecessarily converted a war for the Union into a crusade against slavery, and they objected to the suppression of free speech, the censorship of the press, and the arbitrary arrest of political dissidents. Radicals, on the other hand, blamed Lincoln for moving too slowly against slavery and his failure to understand that the entire social system of the South must be reorganized before the disloyal states could be readmi
tted to the Union. In the heated debates of this session of Congress, Republicans, when not attacking each other, now openly turned their guns on the White House. Thaddeus Stevens, the unquestioned leader of the Radical Republicans in the House of Representatives, dismissed all Lincoln’s actions since the beginning of the war as “flagrant usurpations, deserving the condemnation of the community” and insisted that the President adopt his theory that the South should be treated like a conquered province.
Despite these bitter intraparty quarrels, Republicans in the Thirty-seventh Congress managed to enact an impressive body of legislation. In this third session (1862–1863) they passed a conscription law—one with teeth. Unlike the 1862 act allocating military quotas to the states, it took the recruiting of soldiers out of the hands of state officials and made able-bodied males between the ages of twenty and forty-five subject to call into the national service. They also enacted, at Chase’s strong urging and with Lincoln’s quiet pressure, the National Banking Act, which for the first time established a national currency and permitted the creation of a network of national banks. In previous sessions this Congress had passed the Homestead Act, enacted an internal revenue law that permanently altered the tax structure of the nation, adopted tariff legislation that offered genuine protection to American industry, chartered a transcontinental railroad, established a system of land-grant colleges, and created the Department of Agriculture—all at the same time it dealt with weighty issues concerning the raising of armies and fighting a great civil war. To some this record of substantial achievement, brought about by the cooperation of all factions of the Republicans acting with the President, was surprising, but Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago Tribune, succinctly explained Republican thinking: “An awful responsibility rests upon our party. If it carries the war to a successful close, the people will continue it in power. If it fails, all is lost, Union, party, cause, freedom, and abolition of slavery. Hence we sustain Chase and his National Bank scheme, Stanton and his impulsiveness, Welles and his senility, and Lincoln and his slowness. Let us first get the ship out of the breakers; then court-martial the officers if they deserve it.”
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