ATTITUDE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY—VALLANDIGHAM BANISHED—SPEECH OF EX-PRESIDENT PIERCE—SPEECH OF HORATIO SEYMOUR—LAW OF SUBSTITUTES PERSISTENTLY MISINTERPRETED—THE DRAFT IN NEW YORK—THE RIOTS—THE AUTUMN ELECTIONS.
he second attempt at invasion by Lee had ended at Gettysburg even more disastrously than the first, and he returned to Virginia at the head of hardly more than one-half of the army with which he had set out; on the next day Vicksburg fell, the Mississippi was opened, and Pemberton's entire army stacked their muskets and became prisoners. Then the war should have ended; for the question on which the appeal to arms had been made was practically decided. Four great slave States—Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri—had never really joined the Confederacy, though some of them were represented in its Congress, and the territory that it actually held was steadily diminishing. The great blockade was daily growing more effective, the largest city in the South had been held by National troops for fifteen months, and the Federal authority was maintained somewhere in every State, with the sole exception of Alabama. The delusion that Southern soldiers would make a better army, man for man, than Northern, had long since been dispelled. The nation had suffered from incompetent commanders; but time and experience had weeded them out, and the really able ones were now coming to the front. The taboo had been removed from the black man, and he was rapidly putting on the blue uniform to fight for the enfranchisement of his race. Lincoln with his proclamation, and Meade and Grant with their victories, had destroyed the last chance of foreign intervention. In the military situation there was nothing to justify any further hope for the Confederacy, or any more destruction of life in the vain endeavor to disrupt the Union. If there was any justification for a continuance of the struggle on the part of the insurgents, it was to be found only in a single circumstance—the attitude of the Democratic party in the Northern States; but it must be confessed that this was such as to give considerable color to their expectation of ultimate success.
The habitual feeling of antagonism to the opposite party, from which few men in a land of popular politics are ever wholly free, was reinforced by a sincere belief on the part of many that the Government, in determining to crush the rebellion, had undertaken a larger task than it could ever accomplish. This belief was born of an ignorance that it was impossible to argue with, because it supposed itself to be enlightened and fortified by great historical facts. Both conscious and unconscious demagogues picked out little shreds of history and formulated phrases and catch-words, which village newspapers and village statesmen confidently repeated as unanswerable arguments from the experience of nations. Thus Pitt's exclamation during the war of American independence, "You cannot conquer America!" was triumphantly quoted thousands of times, as an argument for the impossibility of conquering the South. Assertions were freely made that the despotism of the Administration (in trying to save the National armies from useless slaughter, by arresting spies and traitors at the North) exceeded anything ever done by Cæsar or the Russian Czar. The word "Bastile" was given out, without much explanation, and was echoed all along the line. The war Governors of the free States, and especially the provisional military Governors in Tennessee and Louisiana, were called Lincoln's satraps; and "satraps," with divers pronunciations, became a popular word. The fathers of the Republic were all mentioned with sorrowful reverence, and it was declared that the Constitution they had framed was destroyed—not by the Secessionists, but by Mr. Lincoln and his advisers. Somebody invented a story that Secretary Seward had said he had only to reach forth his hand and ring a bell, and any man in the country whom he might designate would at once be seized and thrown into prison; whereupon "the tinkle of Seward's little bell" became a frequent head-line in the Democratic journals. The army before Vicksburg was pointed at in derision, as besieging a place that could never be taken.
It did not occur to any of these orators and journalists to explain the difference between an ocean three thousand miles wide, and the Rappahannock River; or the difference between an absolute monarch born to the purple, and a president elected by a free vote of the people; or even the difference between a state of peace and a state of war. None of them told their hearers that, only eight years before, the city of Sebastopol had withstood the combined armies of England and France for almost a year, while the city of Vicksburg, when Grant besieged it, fell on the forty-seventh day. Nor did any of them ever appear to consider what the probable result would be if the entire Democratic party in Northern States should give the Administration as hearty support as it received from its own.
It is easy to see the fallacy of all those arguments now, and the unwisdom of the policy from which they sprang; but they were a power in the land at that time, and wrought unmeasured mischief. The most conspicuous opponent of the Government in the West was Clement L. Vallandigham, of Ohio, whose position will be understood most readily from a few of his public utterances. He wrote, in May, 1861: "The audacious usurpation of President Lincoln, for which he deserves impeachment, in daring, against the very letter of the Constitution, and without the shadow of law, to raise and support armies, and to provide and maintain a navy, for three years, by mere executive proclamation, I will not vote to sustain or ratify—never." Speaking in his place in the House of Representatives in January, 1863, he said: "I have denounced, from the beginning, the usurpations and infractions, one and all, of law and Constitution, by the President and those under him; their repeated and persistent arbitrary arrests, the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation of freedom of the mails, of the private house, of the press and of speech, and all the other multiplied wrongs and outrages upon public liberty and private right which have made this country one of the worst despotisms on the earth for the past twenty months. To the record and to time I appeal for my justification." In proposing conciliation and compromise as a substitute for the war, he said, borrowing the language of the Indiana Democratic platform, "In considering terms of settlement, we will look only to the welfare, peace, and safety of the white race, without reference to the effect that settlement may have upon the condition of the African." For these and similar utterances, especially in regard to a military order that forbade the carrying of firearms and other means of disturbing the peace, and for the effect they were having upon his followers, Mr. Vallandigham was arrested in May, 1863, by the military authorities in Ohio, tried by court-martial, and sentenced to imprisonment during the war. The President commuted the sentence to banishment beyond the lines, and the prisoner was taken south through Kentucky and Tennessee, and sent into Confederate territory under a flag of truce. This of course placed him in the light of a martyr, and a few months later it made him the Democratic candidate for Governor of Ohio.
In the East, ex-President Pierce, of New Hampshire, loomed up as a leader of the opposition. On January 6, 1860, he had written to Jefferson Davis (who had been Secretary of War in his cabinet) a letter in which he said: "Without discussing the question of right—of abstract power to secede—I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood; and if through the madness of Northern abolitionists that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason and Dixon's line merely. It will be within our own borders, and in our own streets, between the two classes of citizens to whom I have referred. Those who defy law and scout constitutional obligations will, if we ever reach the arbitrament of arms, find occupation enough at home." In an elaborate Fourth-of-July oration at Concord in 1863, he said: "No American citizen was then [before the war] subject to be driven into exile for opinion's sake, or arbitrarily arrested and incarcerated in military bastiles—even as he may now be—not for acts or words of imputed treason, but if he do but mourn in silent sorrow over the desolation of his country. Do we not all know that the cause of our calamities is the vicious intermeddling of too many of the citizens of the Northern States with the constitutional rights of the Southern States, coöperating with the discontents of the people of those States? We have seen, in the experience of the last two years, how futile are all our efforts to maintain the Union by force of arms; but, even had war been carried on by us successfully, the ruinous result would exhibit its utter impracticability for the attainment of the desired end. With or without arms, with or without leaders, we will at least, in the effort to defend our rights as a free people, build up a great mausoleum of hearts, to which men who yearn for liberty will in after years, with bowed heads and reverently, resort, as Christian pilgrims to the sacred shrines of the Holy Land." This was long referred to, by those who heard it, as "the mausoleum-of-hearts speech."
In the great State of New York the Democratic leader was Horatio Seymour, who had been elected Governor in the period of depression that followed the military defeats of 1862. While Pierce was speaking in Concord, Seymour was delivering in New York a carefully written address, in which—like Pierce and Vallandigham—he complained, not of the secessionists for making war at the South, but of the Administration for curtailing the liberty of the Government's enemies at the North. He said: "When I accepted the invitation to speak at this meeting, we were promised the downfall of Vicksburg [the telegraph brought news of it while he was speaking], the opening of the Mississippi, the probable capture of the Confederate capital, and the exhaustion of the rebellion. When the clouds of war overhung our country, we implored those in authority to compromise that difficulty; for we had been told by that great orator and statesman, Burke, that there never yet was a revolution that might not have been prevented by a compromise opportunely and graciously made. Until we have a united North, we can have no successful war; until we have a united, harmonious North, we can have no beneficent peace. Remember this, that the bloody and treasonable and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government."
The practical effect of all these protests, in the name of liberty, against arrests of spies and traitors, and suspension of the habeas corpus, was to assist the slave-holders in their attempt to make liberty forever impossible for the black race, in pursuance of which they were willing to destroy the liberties of the white race and sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives, most of which were valuable to their country and to mankind, being lives of men who earned a living by the sweat of their own faces. All the abridgment of the liberties of Northern citizens, in time of war, by President Lincoln's suspension of the writ, and by arbitrary arrests, was not a tithe of what those same citizens had suffered in time of peace from the existence of slavery under the Constitution. Yet neither President Pierce, nor Chief Justice Taney, nor Horatio Seymour, nor Mr. Vallandigham, had ever uttered one word of protest against the denial of free speech in criticism of that institution, or against the systematic rifling of mails at the South, or against the refusal to permit American citizens to sojourn in the slave States unless they believed in the divine right of slavery.
It was no wonder that such utterances as those quoted above, by the leaders of a party, at such a time, should be translated by its baser followers into reasons for riot, arson, and butchery. Another exciting cause was found in the persistent misinterpretation of what was meant to be a beneficent provision of the conscription law. Drafts had been ordered in several of the States to fill up quotas that were not forthcoming under the volunteer system. The law provided that a man whose name was drawn, if he did not wish to go into the service himself, might either procure a substitute or pay three hundred dollars to the Government and be released. In the North, where there were no slaves to do the necessary work at home, it was absolutely essential to have some system of substitution; and the three-hundred-dollar clause was introduced, not because the Government wanted money more than it wanted men, but to favor the poor by keeping down the price of substitutes, for it was evident that that price could never rise above the sum necessary for a release. Yet this very clause was attacked by the journals that assumed to champion the cause of the poor, as being a discrimination in favor of the rich! Mr. Vallandigham said in a speech at Dayton: "The three-hundred-dollar provision is a most unjust discrimination against the poor. The Administration says to every man between twenty and forty-five, 'Three hundred dollars or your life.'" When the clause had been repealed, in consequence of the ignorant clamor raised by this persistent misrepresentation, the price of substitutes rapidly went beyond a thousand dollars.