The Great Conspiracy, Volume 6 - John Alexander Logan

That season of victory for the Union arms, coming, as it did, upon a season of depression and doubtfulness, was doubly grateful to the loyal heart of the Nation. Daylight seemed to be breaking at last. Gettysburg had hurled back the Southern invader from our soil; and Vicksburg, with the immediately resulting surrender of Port Hudson, had opened the Mississippi river from Cairo to the Gulf, and split the Confederacy in twain.

But it happened just about this time that, the enrollment of the whole Militia of the United States (under the Act of March, 1863), having been completed, and a Draft for 300,000 men ordered to be made and executed, if by a subsequent time the quotas of the various States should not be filled by volunteering, certain malcontents and Copperheads, inspired by agents and other friends of the Southern Conspirators, started and fomented, in the city of New York, a spirit of unreasoning opposition both to voluntary enlistment, and conscription under the Draft, that finally culminated, July 13th, in a terrible Riot, lasting several days, during which that great metropolis was in the hands, and completely at the mercy, of a brutal mob of Secession sympathizers, who made day and night hideous with their drunken bellowings, terrorized everybody even suspected of love for the Union, plundered and burned dwellings, including a Colored Orphan Asylum, and added to the crime of arson, that of murdering the mob-chased, terror-stricken Negroes, by hanging them to the lamp-posts.

These Riots constituted a part of that "Fire in the Rear" with which the Rebels and their Northern Democratic sympathizers had so frequently menaced the Armies of the Union.

Alluding to them, the N. Y. Tribune on July 15th, while its office was invested and threatened with attack and demolition, bravely said: "They are, in purpose and in essence, a Diversion in favor of Jefferson Davis and Lee. Listen to the yells of the mob and the harangues of its favorite orators, and you will find them surcharged with 'Nigger,' 'Abolition,' 'Black Republican,' denunciation of prominent Republicans, The Tribune, etc. etc.—all very wide of the Draft and the exemption. Had the Abolitionists, instead of the Slaveholders, revolted, and undertaken to upset the Government and dissolve the Union, nine-tenths of these rioters would have eagerly volunteered to put them down. It is the fear, stimulated by the recent and glorious triumphs of the Union Arms, that Slavery and the Rebellion must suffer, which is at the bottom of all this arson, devastation, robbery, and murder."

The Democratic Governor, Seymour, by promising to "have this Draft suspended and stopped," did something toward quieting the Riots, but it was not until the Army of the Potomac, now following Lee's retreat, was weakened by the sending of several regiments to New York that the Draft-rioting spirit, in that city, and to a less extent in other cities, was thoroughly cowed.

[In reply to Gov. Seymour's appeal for delay in the execution of the Draft Law, in order to test its Constitutionality, Mr. Lincoln, on the 7th of August, said he could not consent to lose the time that would be involved in obtaining a decision from the U. S. Supreme Court on that point, and proceeded: "We are contending with an Enemy who, as I understand, drives every able-bodied man he can reach into his ranks, very much as a butcher drives bullocks into a slaughter-pen. No time is wasted, no argument is used.

"This system produces an Army which will soon turn upon our now victorious soldiers already in the field, if they shall not be sustained by recruits as they should be.

It produces an Army with a rapidity not to be matched on our side, if we first waste time to re-experiment with the Volunteer system, already deemed by Congress, and palpably, in fact, so far exhausted as to be inadequate; and then more time to obtain a Court decision as to whether a law is Constitutional which requires a part of those not now in the Service to go to those who are already in it, and still more time to determine with absolute certainty that we get those who are to go, in the precisely legal proportion to those who are not to go.

"My purpose is to be in my action Just and Constitutional, and yet Practical, in performing the important duty with which I am charged, of maintaining the Unity and the Free principles of our common Country.">[

Worried and weakened by this Democratic opposition to the Draft, and the threatened consequent delays and dangers to the success of the Union Cause, and depressed moreover by the defeat of the National forces under Rosecrans at Chickamauga; yet, the favorable determination of the Fall elections on the side of Union and Freedom, and the immense majorities upholding those issues, together with Grant's great victory (November, 1863) of Chattanooga—where the three days of fighting in the Chattanooga Valley and up among the clouds of Lookout Mountain and Mission Ridge, not only effaced the memory of Rosecrans's previous disaster, but brought fresh and imperishable laurels to the Union Arms—stiffened the President's backbone, and that of Union men everywhere.

Not that Mr. Lincoln had shown any signs of weakness or wavering, or any loss of hope in the ultimate result of this War for the preservation of the Union—which now also involved Freedom to all beneath its banner. On the contrary, a letter of his written late in August shows conclusively enough that he even then began to see clearly the coming final triumph—not perhaps as "speedy," as he would like, in its coming, but none the less sure to come in God's "own good time," and furthermore not appearing "to be so distant as it did" before Gettysburg, and especially Vicksburg, was won; for, said he: "The signs look better. The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the Sea".