The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 2 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

As has been pointed out in a former chapter, there was a party at the North, only slightly inferior in strength to that of the administration, which determinedly opposed the further prosecution of the war. This opposition was in part political and in part economic. On its economic side it enlisted all those men who had business interests or business hopes connected with the Southern trade. On its political side it included all men at the North who were opposed to the policies and the principles of the Republican party. It included also a vast multitude of men who had from their youth up hated Abolitionism, and detested the thought of negro equality in this land.

Still another force, and not a small one, had its influence. There were men of earnest minds, throughout the North, who seriously apprehended the undermining of the Constitution and the destruction of liberty in our country by the exercise of what are called war powers. These men were genuinely and patriotically alarmed when they saw the power of the National Government used to suspend the habeas corpus—that traditional bulwark of personal liberty the existence of which has been for many centuries regarded by all English-speaking men as their most priceless possession. When these men saw in addition a declaration of martial law, and the establishment of a system of passports as rigid as that of any military despotism, and when at last they saw the administration openly assuming and exercising the power of overturning the institutions of states by mere executive proclamation, they grew gravely alarmed for liberty itself. To them it seemed—rightly or wrongly—that in the struggle to free the negro slaves of the South there was very serious danger of incurring the loss of liberty to all men in this Republic. Being unwilling to exchange all that is fundamental in the Republic for the freeing of some negro slaves these earnest thinkers,—whether mistakenly or not,—opposed with all their might the further progress of the war and sought in every legal and constitutional way to make an end of it.

This then was the situation. The North had armies in the field vastly outnumbering those of its adversary and immeasurably better equipped and supplied. But public sentiment at the South was a unit, while the North in its political views was a house divided against itself. For the South to have abandoned its cause at such a time and under such circumstances merely by reason of military reverses, when it still had in the field some hundreds of thousands of veteran troops, would have been an act of cowardice inconceivable to American men.

In New York City there was a complete failure to make adequate response to Mr. Lincoln's demand for further troops. Either the government must go without the important quota from the principal city in the nation, or else a draft must be ordered to make good the deficiencies in the volunteering. This Republic of ours had always thitherto depended upon the patriotism of its people for such strength as it might need in a fighting way. It had several times happened that during wars against foreign powers some parts of the country had manifested an unpatriotic lack of enthusiasm, and had failed to furnish their quotas of volunteers for the common defense. But there had been then no thought of dragging men unwillingly into the military service, although there had been great public indignation throughout the rest of the country over the unpatriotic attitude of a part of the Union. The quotas that some of the states refused to furnish were made good by a larger volunteering in other parts of the country.

But in 1863 the conditions were radically different. The war for which the new levies were wanted was a war against Americans, and not for the defense of the nation against foreign powers. In the view of very many men it was, rightly or wrongly, regarded as a war instigated by a sectional, political party in the name of the nation for the destruction of all that was fundamental in the nation. The time has long gone by when it was worth while to argue the soundness or unsoundness of these opinions. It is necessary now only to record the fact of their existence in aid of an understanding of what happened.

The draft was begun in New York on the eleventh of July, 1863. That date fell upon a Saturday. The draft had been opposed in some of the newspapers and in public speeches as unconstitutional, and as an invasion of those private rights which free government is instituted among men to secure. There was murmuring and muttering throughout the Saturday's operations and by the time that Monday came there was throughout the city an aroused spirit of protest which threatened violence. That violence came with a vengeance when the draft was resumed on Monday. Angry crowds surrounded the offices in which the drawings were to be made. The street cars were stopped and their horses unhitched. Then the draft offices were invaded and sacked, and in some cases the buildings were set on fire. At one point an entire block was burned by the mob; at another point there were battles fought between the populace and the police which rivaled in violence and in slaughter skirmishes on the lines in Virginia. Mobs filled the streets in every direction, and for a time had their own way. The office of the New York "Tribune" was assailed and it was defended only by running out chutes from which hand grenades could be dropped into the throngs below, and by arming the printers and other employees with muskets and abundant cartridges. The office of the "Evening Post" was defended against the mob by steam jets shot from hose attached to the boilers that worked the machinery and the presses.

In the meanwhile every negro who made his appearance in the street was assaulted and eleven of them fell victims to the anger of the populace. A negro orphan asylum in Fifth avenue at 44th street was sacked and burned by the infuriated rioters and its helpless little wards narrowly escaped by the way of back doors.

In Second avenue the police and soldiers were attacked from the windows and the roofs of houses. They quickly wreaked a terrible vengeance. They pushed their way into every house and every room of every house, assailed everybody they could find there, whether guilty or innocent of offense, thrust many of them through with bayonets without inquiring as to their degree of culpability, brained many others in like unquestioned manner with locust clubs, threw some of them over balusters upon the stones below, hurled some out of fourth and fifth story windows to be crushed upon the pavement, followed the fleeing ones to the roofs, and shot them there as the most northern of northern historians has recorded—we quote his exact language—"refusing all mercy, and threw the quivering corpses into the street as a warning to the mob."

All this occurred more than forty-five years ago. The war which gave birth to such fury is a matter of history now, not of controversy. It is not worth while nearly half a century later to inquire too curiously into the rights and wrongs, or into the responsibilities involved in such things. But it is perhaps of human advantage, or at the least of curious historic interest, to note that all these things were done in professed service to that personal liberty which free government among men is instituted to secure.

From the point of view of the angels and other superior intelligences there could be nothing more gruesomely ludicrous than the attitude and condition of the American people on both sides of the war-drawn lines at that period. On both sides men professed and honestly believed that their supreme concern was for the maintenance—in Mr. Lincoln's phrase—of a "government of the people, by the people and for the people." Yet on each side there existed, and men consented to it, a military despotism as arbitrary, as unreasoning, and as tyrannical as that of Russia itself. On either side no man could travel without permission of some provost authority which there was nowhere any power to question or any court to curb. On either side that military power which our Constitution requires to be always subordinate to the civil arm, had laid its iron hand without even the disguise of a velvet glove upon the fate and fortune and life of every citizen of a land supposed to be the freest on earth. In New York men could be butchered in their homes and thrown out of high windows without so much as the order of a sheriff in justification. In Richmond Winder's men made practical prisoners of all soldiers and citizens who undertook to traverse the streets upon however laudable an occasion.