By autumn a new frontier was established, for all practical purposes, and was later affirmed by signatories of the Washington Treaty.
The North had lost all of Maryland except Cecil County of that State, and had lost also the southernmost county of Delaware. The North had lost the State of Kentucky. The North had gained the new State of West Virginia, with at least the reluctant blessing of the peace conference. Missouri also was retained. Kansas was not even mentioned in the treaty: this region of one-time bloody contention had been admitted to the Union more than two months before the firing on Fort Sumter, and was occupied by ardent Free-Soilers.
And the North lost Washington, D.C.
Actually this blow to national prestige was delivered not by any cogitation of diplomats, but by the mere fact of Washington’s geographical location: it was ordained historically in the moment of Maryland’s official espousal of the Confederacy. Obviously the capital of a country could not exist or function if planted within the boundaries of a rival nation.
In a manner of symbolism, however, it was the most bitter potion which the North was compelled to swallow in the awful dosage of defeat. The core, the brain, the heart center, nerve center of the United States of America, necessarily handed over to the Confederate States of America—complete with its Government buildings, its new Capitol, its storied White House, the monuments and traditions and memories—! Veterans of Bull Run and Antietam looked at one another with stony gaze; curses crept from their lips. Loyal women cried, loyal deacons prayed, children wailed questions which were beyond answering. The taunts of a hostile foreign press sounded from abroad.
Washington had to go, there was no help for it. Resumption of a disheartening conflict, stemming solely from a desire to keep Maryland in the Union, was the only alternative. Despite the fury of anguished patriots, and fevered accusations of Betrayal! hurled at peace delegates from the North, the District of Columbia was handed over to the Confederacy (it was promptly renamed the District of Dixie).
Less misery attended a compromise relating to disposition of the Indian Territory, although the peacemakers struggled for nearly a month with this question alone. That barren region lay very nearly surrounded on three sides by Confederate states; yet Northern delegates resisted strenuously all persuasions to award the area to the South. At last, urgency demanded that the problem be placed in abeyance; this was done by the establishment of a joint commission for future arbitration. All forts within the Territory were ordered to be vacated (an act condemned by trans-Mississippi congressmen, and one which engendered almost endless disputes and hazards).
At noon on the 16th of December, ink was drying on the treaty’s signatures. Noted names were affixed: such as Stephens, Semmes and Johnston for the South … Seward, Greeley and McClellan for the North … commissioners selected by their respective governments in Richmond and Philadelphia.
Thirteen Southern States, a compact Confederacy.
And now only twenty-two Northern States. California and Oregon were separated from the rest by vast territorial regions with dignity of Statehood to be achieved in the future.
By request of the Confederates, the language of the original Declaration was reemployed in affirming “that these [States] are and of right ought to be, free and independent.” There was some haggling on the subject of reparations, then the matter was put aside; it was revived sporadically later in both Congresses, but eventually came by way of being an international jest. (Washington City, most folks felt had been reparation enough.) On the whole, the commissioners worked with laudable despatch; and so, to the amazement of the world, did both Congresses and Executives when it came to ratification. The Confederate States ratified the treaty on Monday, December 28th; the United States two days later.
Perforce the Southern offices would remain in Richmond until the United States had removed its own baggage from Washington—a huge physical encumbrance of two generations’ legislative and executive and judicial accumulation. June 1st, 1864, was set as the date of formal withdrawal; the United States to pay all costs of labor and transportation; and it was agreed that Confederate troops should perform guard duty throughout the operation below the new international boundary (the commissioners recognized complications if Northern troops were to operate in such capacity.)
Philadelphia, an emergency capital during the previous summer, would continue to serve as temporary capital. But the proponents of a plan for the designation of Philadelphia as the permanent site met with a storm of objection from every State west of the Alleghenies. Even President Hamlin, a Maine man, promised that he would veto any plan for the establishment of a new capital on the Atlantic seaboard. Congress rocked with debate, week after week; the newspapers fulminated, sneered, grew sage in advice. There were plans for carving a model city out of fresh wilderness, as Washington City had been carved originally. But the physical disadvantages of that plan were apparent.
Freshly built wooden warehouses which stretched their dreary length along the outskirts of Philadelphia filled more solidly with impedimenta of the Government, week after week. Night and day the long trains rumbled up through Maryland with their precious freight of files, furniture, records, statuary, relics, portraits, documents. The housing situation was deplorable; a “model” city of temporary barracks was set up on the banks of the Schuylkill River for the benefit of unhappy Government employees and their families. At times there appeared to be, as Artemus Ward wrote, “a lot more kayose in the Pees then in the War.”
America sighed with relief when, in March of 1864, after months of wrangling, the new site was selected. It was Columbus, Ohio. With the approval of voters offered at a special election, the State of Ohio removed its own capital to Cleveland, and ceded a 100-square-mile district to the Nation. In this area the name of the District of Columbia was perpetuated; the city itself was renamed Columbia. Blasting, hammering—the marble-cutting, the straining of hoists began. Through the 1860s armies of workmen toiled and a mat of dust lay thick above the confluence of two Ohio rivers. Slowly the new capital took shape.
(Three successive bond issues were authorized, to pay for it. But these were not sufficient; heavier taxation was the final result, and many tax increases were not repealed for years to come. Secretary of State William H. Seward was compelled to give up his dream of purchasing Russian America. “Seward’s Folly” was openly laughed about in Congress, and no political machination could ever bring the matter to a vote. Seward, who served again as Secretary of State during Hamlin’s second term, insisted to his dying day that he was right and that the purchase should have been made. But public opinion appeared to have crystalized in the assertion of the irrepressible Artemus Ward: “I kind of gess that what we need is a noo Kapital insted of an iceburg.”)
Monday night, July 4th, 1864, the Confederacy celebrated President Davis’s arrival at the White House in Washington with a fabulous reception and ball. This event assumed a social and political importance unrivaled in Southern history. Fifty years afterward, if an elderly woman whispered, “I was at The Ball,” everyone understood the reference; and the proudest boast of any aging poverty-stricken one-time politician was assuredly the same.
A few Northern dignitaries were invited to attend. Almost to a man the civilians declined, with the exception of the peace commissioners of the previous winter, who felt that their presence might have a salubrious effect upon relations between the two countries. Some of the military did accept, but they paid their respects with restraint, and most of them retired from the scene at an early hour. Dancers whirled in waltzes in the East Room and the parlors; old portraits of Washington and new (posthumous) portraits of Stonewall Jackson and Albert Sidney Johnston looked down solemnly on the revelers. As well as the original Fourth of July, the first anniversary of the victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg was being observed officially.
The red-bearded J. E. B. Stuart, proud of his new lieutenant-general’s commission, prouder still of the charming wife with whom he jounced
in a polka, found time to establish himself before a throng of admirers and recite one of his characteristic flights into poesy:
“When Mars with his stentorian blare
Decreed that spears of war must fly,
He little recked that cannons’ glare
Would paint the chill of Northern sky!
The Dove of Peace now perches cool,
And Venus offers balm to all—”
No longer was there an auburn-haired Kate Chase wielding the imperious wand of her beauty, no longer was there a Mary Todd Lincoln to set tongues gossiping by the extravagance of her gowns. Mrs. Kate Chase Sprague was now circulating a little less imperiously in dull, crowded Philadelphia. And Mary Todd Lincoln was in Illinois.
So was her husband, the only President of the United States to resign his office. Released from detention in Richmond a month before (as a pronounced gesture of international amity) he had withdrawn quietly to his former home at Springfield.
There patiently he endured the flood of calumny, vituperation and mere criticism which rushed around him; there he received the rare affirmation of personal loyalty and affection from friends who still clung; and from there he went, a few months afterward, to practice law in Chicago, along with the stout Lamon.
More profitable legal business than he might have believed possible came Mr. Lincoln’s way. “Hill,” he said to his worshiping partner in March, “I thought to be turned out to grass, and winter-killed grass at that. Never did I expect to discover a downright clover patch!” On the evening of April 14th, 1865, he went to McVicker’s Theatre where Taylor’s trivial play, Our American Cousin, was being presented. There, while seated with friends in a box, he was shot to death by an actor whose hatred for Abraham Lincoln had survived all changes of status and of capitals, all affirmations of Peace.
* * *
“The honeymoon of war was ended. The Confederacy was now faced with the inexorable necessity for an adjustment to those mundane housekeeping tasks which a nation must accomplish, daily and yearly and eternally, if it is to dwell with itself in domestic harmony and productivity. The Southern States, by act of conflict, had annulled a distasteful marriage to the original Federal Government. But the establishment of their national independence had in no way resolved the cumulative problems of individual commonwealths’ cooperation within a centralized structure.”
Thus cogently has the basic perplexity of the new Confederate States of America been summed up by an astute political observer and historian.*
The same situation might not exist in peace which had prevailed when the Confederacy was animated by the grim demands and pressures of warfare … even then the Nation had fumbled severely. Cabinet member after cabinet member was appointed and confirmed, only to offer an early resignation. The interference of Mr. Davis with his generals had been typified as a scandal by outspoken critics of his administration, and men of as exalted position as Robert Toombs had been placed under arrest. The frail but thorny Vice-President, Alexander Stephens, openly affirmed his disapproval of many of Mr. Davis’s policies. A young Confederate officer in Texas stated in public that he should like to run his sword through the heart of Sam Houston; and only a few years previously Houston had been idolized as the savior of the Lone Star State. A grumble of “too much Virginia” was current throughout the armies, and angry North Carolinians insisted that they were robbed of military opportunity and credit. Yet the war had been fought by the South to a successful conclusion. The dissident States achieved independence, but, in the opinion of much of the outside world, did not know what to do with it. Angry bickering between the States, and opinionated resistance to the authority of Washington, characterized the rest of Davis’s administration. Only when President Robert E. Lee entered the White House, in 1868, did rivalries go into temporary abeyance, and the momentary lessening of dispute may be ascribed almost as much to the so-called “Veterans’ Reform Congress,” as to any other cause.
The government under Lee achieved a measure of serenity; but this seemed merely a duplication and protraction of wartime illusion. Basic problems and conflicts had not been solved: they had only been put aside for a time. And it was no extraneous power which worked toward confusion of the new nation: congenitally Dixie carried the seeds of internal sickness within its own loins. Open identification of these ills was like a reversion to the slogans and phrases of wartime. They were two: States’ rights, and slavery. They were cured almost simultaneously.
There existed noticeable jealousy between the extreme trans-Mississippi region and the bulk of the Confederacy. In attitude Texas stood aloof from her neighbors, Louisiana and Arkansas. In history, population and ambition, Texas was dissimilar. The fire of that original independence which had been established for more than five years, only a young lifetime in the past, could not be put down; nor, amid ardent Texans, was there much desire to extinguish it. Beyond the Sabine River dwelt many vociferous ex-soldiers who asserted that they had but exchanged one brand of Washingtonian tyranny for another. Even during the beneficent Lee administration there were two occasions when Texas senators and representatives stalked from the legislative chambers in dudgeon, to return only after a process of cajolery and mediation was indulged in.
The great State had entered a period of almost immediate internal prosperity, as its cattle herds began to swell in multitude, and as a hungry United States clamored for beef. There might be at the time no economical transportation of beef, either slaughtered or on the hoof, from Texas to her sister States at the East. But cattle could be driven cheaply across the dusty neglected Indian Territory, and into corrals springing up alongside new Kansas railroads. Furthermore, the general table economy of the South was adjusted on a self-sustaining basis, region by region. There was not the taste or market for beef which Texans found in the North. Other Southern commonwealths might envy the flow of Yankee gold into Texas; they could not duplicate it, even in cotton and tobacco. Prosperity from these sources was a thing to be achieved in slower and more cumulative fashion.
Texans recognized a sore point in the fact that combined deliberations of years had brought no answer to the Indian Territory question. The commissioners who juggled this international-continental hot potato were continually being replaced; they’d had their political fingers scorched in the process. And, North and South alike, the acceptance of appointment to the joint Indian Territorial Commission began to be regarded as residence in a political graveyard. Four different compromise treaties were tendered for ratification before 1875; two had been rejected by the Confederacy, two by the United States.
On March 2nd, 1878, a column of some fifteen hundred Texans, who had been trained and armed in secrecy, rode north across the Red River, and deployed at strategic points throughout the Indian Territory. There were no garrisons of either Confederate or United States troops in the region: such strongpoints had been expressly forbidden by the Washington Treaty of 1863, and only a few white traders or outlaws were resident. Rumors about the intended coup d’état had of course reached both Washington and Columbia, but generally were discounted by those in authority.
In the most embittered language which had been employed diplomatically since the war, Columbia demanded that Washington order the immediate withdrawal of Texas troops. To the Union’s satisfaction, President John B. Gordon of the Confederacy resisted sternly the advice of those militants who urged that Confederate army forces should be sent to support the Texans.
“Do the gentlemen desire a renewal of fratricidal strife on this continent?” Gordon returned witheringly. “Would the gentlemen ordain a Manassas and a Chancellorsville in the unpopulated sagebrush country?” Empowered by a hastily-summoned Congress, President Gordon forthwith directed that Governor Houston Lockey of Texas remove his “militia” from the disputed area. This Lockey refused to do. He said that they were not State militia as such—they were private individuals, and that his authority over them did not extend beyond Texas boundaries.
In the North, Ab
olitionists of the old days raised their voices, crying that United States territory had been invaded, and that troops were needed immediately to expel the Texans. The most reactionary press exclaimed that once more North and South stood on the brink of war; but public apathy was at first astounding, and, later, quite understandable. This was the fruit of fifteen years of haggling by the joint commission. The Indian Territory problem was too old, too shop-worn, it seemed no part of the angry present.
At an unprecedented rate, Northern migration had been flowing into the West. A steel fabric of railroads was knitting the Pacific States ever more tightly into the Union. Despite Indian resistance in the northwest and southwest, hordes of settlers had pushed their way into previously untenanted wastes. Reiterating the Young-Man-Go-West counsel which he had given Josiah B. Grinnell in a previous generation, Horace Greeley declared in 1872: “It is a phenomenon unparalleled, a pageant previously unwitnessed. Perhaps a third of a million Americans in the prime of manhood are now striding in their haleness, who might be devoid of breath and heartbeat had the War of the Southern Revolution been prolonged.… They must move somewhere. Let them move to the West.”
By-passing the unattractive riddle of the Indian Territory, a sweep of westward settlement had filled Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado—oozing indelibly up toward Oregon and the Washington Territory, seeping down into mineral-rich mountains which extended north of the Mexican border. Citizens of the United States possessed neither the time, energy nor will to take up arms for the retention (many spoke of it as the acquisition) of a region commonly declared to be unproductive and without charm for the land-hungry. Only a handful of fanatical Kansas volunteers galloped south, declaring an intention to banish all Texans from the area. Long-range rifles whirred, there were ambuscades and bushwhacking attended with small loss of life on either side. Governor Lockey made bold to order in the Texas Rangers, and the Kansans were compelled to flee. Both parties, it turned out, had more to fear from Indian attack than from each other.
If the South Had Won the Civil War Page 4