Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (43 page)

It became increasingly difficult for many War Democrats to keep that line up: Stanton and Butler both moved over to the Republicans at a very early stage of the war and became ardent supporters of emancipation; Joseph Holt served as Lincoln’s judge advocate general. Increasingly, political momentum in the party passed to the “Peace Democrats.” Rallying around prominent Democrats such as Samuel Tilden, Horatio Seymour, and Fernando Wood of New York, Samuel S. Cox, Alexander Long, and George H. Pendleton of Ohio, George Woodward of Pennsylvania, and James Bayard and Willard Saulsbury of Delaware, the Peace Democrats reversed the War Democrats’ order of priorities: end Lincoln’s war before it destroyed the country, even if it meant conceding Southern independence.
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The Republicans looked on the agitation of the Peace Democrats as just more evidence of the same dangerous Democratic policies that had brought on the war in the first place, and so it was not long before partisanship yielded to howling accusations of treason. “These men make the conditions of peace the humiliation of the North,” protested the
Philadelphia Press
. “If they will not serve the country, they should not become the enemies of those in the country’s service.” At first it was only a matter of name-calling: in the fall of 1861, Ohio Republicans began comparing leading Peace Democrats to copperhead rattlesnakes, and “Copperhead” became the standard Republican way of talking about Democrats. Few of these opposition Democrats were really cut from the same cloth: even Peace Democrats were divided between peace-at-any-price extremists and moderates who wanted to end the war but not at the price of outright disloyalty. Little in these distinctions got much attention in the fevered atmosphere of the war, however. As Confederate agents attempted to manipulate Democratic dissent into outright resistance, army generals began removing Democratic judges from their benches, Democratic preachers from their pulpits, and Democratic newspapers from the mail. Estimates of the actual number of arrests by military authorities vary, from only about 4,400 all the way up to 35,000. But each one of these was treated as an insufferable violation of civil liberties, and each one only heightened Democratic resentments at Lincoln’s administration.
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The most sensational and illuminating of these civil liberties cases concerned the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio in 1863, Clement Laird Vallandigham. Forty-three years old and the most handsome politician in America, Vallandigham sat in Congress from 1858 until 1863, when Republicans in the Ohio legislature successfully gerrymandered his district out from under him. It was not hard to see why. Vallandigham wore the “Copperhead” tag as a badge of honor, even to the point of
fashioning a lapel pin made from the head of a copper penny. “I am not a Northern man. I have little sympathy with the North, no very good feeling for, and I am bound to her by no tie whatsoever, other than what once were and ought always to be among the strongest of all ties—a common language and common country,” Vallandigham said in 1859. If anything, he was as much a secessionist and sectionalist as the Calhounites. “I am a Western Man, by birth, in habit, by education… and … wholly devoted to Western interests,” even “a Western Sectionalist, and so shall continue to the day of my death.”
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In January 1863 Vallandigham decided to run for governor of Ohio, and thereupon he ran afoul of Major General Ambrose Burnside. A thoroughgoing War Democrat and now commander of the Department of the Ohio, Burnside issued a general order that forbade “the habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy” and threatened that “persons committing such offenses will be at once arrested, with a view to being tried… or sent beyond our lines into the lines of their friends”—“their friends,” of course, meaning the Confederates. Vallandigham became an obvious target for Burnside’s order, and on May 1, 1863, Burnside planted several spies in an election crowd that Vallandigham was due to address. Vallandigham made numerous incautious remarks about a “wicked, cruel, and unnecessary war” that was “not being waged for the preservation of the Union” but for “the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism,” and he declared “that he was at all times, and upon all occasions, resolved to do what he could to defeat the attempts now being made to build up a monarchy upon the ruins of our free government.” In peacetime this sort of rhetoric would hardly have gotten Vallandigham more than a few column-inches in the newspapers, but now it was enough to set General Burnside off like a Roman candle. Four days later, a company of Federal soldiers broke down the door of Vallandigham’s house and hauled him off to Cincinnati for a military trial.
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Vallandigham was no fool: though a military commission easily found him guilty of violating Burnside’s general order and sentenced him to imprisonment in Fort Warren, in Boston harbor, he appealed for a writ of habeas corpus and cast himself as a martyr in the cause of the Constitution. Sensing the political Pandora’s box that Vallandigham’s arrest could easily open, Lincoln changed his sentence from imprisonment to banishment in the Confederacy. But Lincoln was unable to escape the eruption of attack and abuse from Northern Democrats that followed, and when the Ohio Democrats met in Columbus in June to select a nominee for the Ohio governorship, a crowd of as many as 100,000 showed up to demand Vallandigham’s
nomination. Vallandigham’s absentee campaign slowly evaporated without his magnetic presence, however, and a daring Confederate raid into Ohio under John Hunt Morgan frightened Ohioans into a clearer sense of their wartime priorities. When the votes were tallied in the fall elections, Vallandigham lost his long-distance bid for the governorship by 100,000 votes. Relieved, Lincoln turned his attention to matters other than Vallandigham, and when he was advised in the summer of 1864 that Vallandigham had slipped back into Ohio, disguising himself with a set of false whiskers and a cape, Lincoln merely recommended that the new departmental commander leave Vallandigham alone. “Watch Vallandigham and others closely,” Lincoln advised, but “otherwise do not arrest without further order. …”
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The oddity of the Democratic protests over Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the Vallandigham arrest was how atypical the Vallandigham, Merryman, and Milligan cases were. When historians have looked closely at the record of civil arrests under Lincoln’s administration, most of them have turned out to be arrests for wartime racketeering, the imprisonment of captured blockade runners, deserters, and the detention of suspicious Confederate citizens, not the imprisonment of political dissenters; most of the cases concerning the notorious military commissions occurred, in fact, in areas of the occupied Confederacy, not in the North.
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The Vallandigham case notwithstanding, Lincoln was as undisposed to erect a political despotism over the North as he was to fashion a legislative despotism over Congress. When measured against the far vaster civil liberties violations levied on German Americans and Japanese Americans in America’s twentieth-century world wars, Lincoln’s casual treatment of Vallandigham appears almost dismissive.

Lincoln’s presidency has often been characterized as a “war presidency,” and indeed Lincoln’s four years as president are unique for having coincided almost in their entirety with a condition of war. Still, that should not distract attention from the very considerable energy he devoted to domestic issues. In addition to rebuilding the national banking system, Lincoln and his Congress introduced a sweeping new tariff plan—the Morrill Tariff, named for Vermont senator Justin Smith Morrill—that would offer the shield of import duties not only to American manufacturing but to agriculture and mining as well. The Morrill Tariff, which came into effect even before Lincoln took office, pegged tariffs as high as 36 percent; thus it “radically changed the policy of our customs duties,” wrote Maine congressman James Blaine, “and put the nation in the attitude of self-support in manufactures.” A Homestead Act, introduced by the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy at the opening of
the first regular session of the 37th Congress, opened up 160-acre blocks of federal lands in the western territories at the fire-sale price of $1.25 an acre. No longer could pro-slavery propagandists such as George Fitzhugh boast that Northern factory workers were just as enslaved to their benches as black slaves were to their plantations; the way was now open for every immigrant, every day laborer, every “penniless beginner in the world” to acquire “a patch of wild, vacant public land, and convert it into a homestead and productive farm.” In July 1862 Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Bill, which put government-backed loans at the disposal of the single greatest internal improvements project in American history: the transcontinental railroad.
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Lincoln and his Congress understood both the war and the politics of the war to be devoted to a single goal, and that was the ushering in of a great free-labor millennium in which middle-class culture in the form of free schools, small-town industry, and Protestant moralism would spread peace, prosperity, and liberal democracy across the continent. “Commerce and civilization go hand in hand,” proclaimed Pennsylvania Republican James H. Campbell, “civilization of that high type which shall spread the cultivated valley, the peaceful village, the church, the school-house, and thronging cities.”
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In that respect, Lincoln was as much the last Whig president as the first Republican one, and his presidency marked the triumph of most of Henry Clay’s old “American System” over the political legacy built up since 1800 by successive Democratic administrations.

T
he ordinary soldier of the Civil War was in almost every case a temporary volunteer. Unlike most of the European nations, which either used a universal military draft and a trained national reserve (as did France or Prussia) or relied upon an army of long-serving professionals (Britain), the armies of the American Civil War were filled with untutored amateurs who had left their plows in their fields or their pens by their inkwells and fully expected to return to them as soon as the war was over. What their officers knew about tactics, combat, and war in general could have been fitted onto a calling card without crowding. Although both the Union and the Confederacy eventually resorted to a compulsory draft to keep their ranks filled, the number of men who were actually drafted for war service was comparatively small. Even when the draft itself was a motivation, right down to the end of the war it was the volunteer, signing the enlistment papers of his own volition, who shouldered the burden of war.

These volunteers had almost as many reasons for enlisting as there were ordinary soldiers to volunteer. In the first weeks of conflict, Confederate secretary of war Leroy P. Walker was swamped with offers from 300,000 men to serve in the Confederate army, and not a few of them were straightforward in their frank willingness to fight for slavery. When asked why he had enlisted, Douglas J. Cater, a musician in the 3rd Texas Cavalry, “thought of the misguided and misinformed fanatical followers of W
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. Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe” who had driven the issue of slavery through Congress until the Southern states “saw no other solution than a peaceful withdrawal and final separation.” Cater owned no slaves himself, but he was convinced that slavery was the right condition for blacks. Northerners “had now become fanatical, and wrote and preached about it, without considering the condition of the Negro in the jungles of Africa as
compared to his happy condition (of course there were exceptions) with his master in the cultivation of the fields of the southern states.” As a result, secession was merely the South’s “exercise of Constitutional rights in their desire for harmony and peace.”
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For many more Southerners, it was individual local patriotisms rather than the defense of slavery or even the Confederacy that tipped the tide toward enlistment. Joseph Newton Brown, who enlisted in the 1st South Carolina Rifles in 1861, dismissed secessionist political rhetoric as claptrap and insisted, “The war was brought on by the politicians and the newspapers.” He enlisted anyway, and stayed in the Confederate army all through the war out of a sense of responsibility to his community. Similarly, Patrick Cleburne, a well-born Protestant immigrant from Ireland, owned no slaves and had no interest in slavery, but he enlisted in the 1st Arkansas in 1861 because “these people have been my friends and have stood up to me on all occasions.”
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Others cast the war in dramatic terms as a war of national self-defense, protecting hearth and home from invaders. However protracted the debates over secession had been before the war, the Confederacy was no slaveholders’ coup. Texas lieutenant Theophilus Perry believed that he “was standing at the threshold of my door fighting against robbers and savages for the defense of my wife & family.” Georgian William Fleming declared that he was fighting “not only for our country—her liberty & independence, but we fight for our homes, our firesides, our religion—every thing that makes life dear.” Then there was Philip Lightfoot Lee, of Bullitt County, Kentucky, who offered a whole calendar of loyalties as his reason for joining the Confederacy. At first, he explained, he was for the Union; if that split apart, he was for Kentucky; if Kentucky failed, he would go for Bullitt County; if Bullitt County collapsed, he would fight for his hometown, Shephardsville; and if Shephardsville was divided, he would fight for his side of the street. And of course there were always those such as John Jackman, who enlisted simply on the impulse of a friend’s suggestion while walking to the local railroad station to buy a newspaper.
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Northern soldiers found themselves enlisting for an equally wide variety of reasons. For some Northerners, the war was a campaign to keep the American republic from being torn in two and made vulnerable to the hungry ambitions of foreign aristocracies. Ulysses S. Grant was moved by the fear that “our republican institutions were regarded as experiments up to the breaking out of the rebellion, and monarchical Europe generally believed that our republic was a rope of sand that would part the moment the slightest strain was brought upon it.” Wilbur Fiske, who enlisted in the 2nd Vermont, believed that “slavery has fostered an aristocracy of the rankest
kind,” and unless it was rooted up, it would choke the last stand of democracy. Walt Whitman, who found part-time government work in Washington so that he could serve as a nurse in the army hospitals, wrote in 1863 that a divided America would reduce the world’s greatest liberal experiment to the level of a third-rate power, which would then lie prone at the feet of England and France. “The democratic republic,” groaned Whitman, has mistakenly granted “the united wish of all the nations of the world that her union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell’d to descend to the level of kingdoms and empires.” So long as the war raged, Whitman believed, “there is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the United States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember’d by it.”
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