The Lost Gettysburg Address (22 page)

Charles Anderson found himself in a familiar position. He was
seriously ill, with no prospects for the future. He focused on ways that
he could once again try to rebuild a career for himself and his family,
but all he could think about was the health of his beloved country.
Like a man hopelessly in love, Anderson was obsessed with finding
ways to lend support to the great cause of his life. His service in the
army had been brief. His diplomatic mission had ended in failure.
He possessed one set of tools, however, that appeared useful in this
titanic struggle—a keen mind, a silver tongue, and a powerful voice.
As soon as he was well enough to stand, Anderson hit the road with
a message designed to shore up support for the war effort. The threat
of Vallandigham’s dangerous ideas moved him to action.

Anderson began to assemble support for a Union Party effort
that would transcend the incessant bickering between Democrats
and Republicans and focus on uniting behind the army and the
Lincoln administration. He rallied the officers of the Ohio regiments
at Murfreesboro to draft a set of resolutions that denounced Peace
Democrats in the North as traitors and demanded a mass meeting to
be held in Cincinnati on February 23. Current and former governors
of both Ohio and Indiana attended, along with General
Lew Wallace
and other key leaders of both major political parties. Anderson was
too ill to attend the meeting at Pike’s Opera House but sent a letter
instead that was later published. It spoke for the troops and their
feelings of rage against their former friends, who were creating a “fire in
the rear,” while they fought and died for their country.
⁶

Anderson argued strenuously against the so-called Peace Party.
Reunion with the present Confederate government was impossible,
he stressed, as the regime was “a despotism the most absolute and
unmitigated upon the globe.” The North could not place their trust in
the same conspirators who had plotted and carried out abject treason
and dominated a formerly free people by the power of a slaveholding
oligarchy. This is a war between two opposite ideals of government,
Anderson declared. The South, by continuing to breed and hold
slaves, had committed to a Spartan-like society of rule by brute force.
Their thirst for more lands to accommodate their increasing
numbers of slave captives promised an inevitable war of conquest against
the free states, Anderson predicted. The threat of a hostile, adjacent
neighbor state would turn the North into a military republic.

To Vallandigham’s prediction that an imagined West section might
unite with the Southern Confederacy, Anderson did not hide his
disgust. In like fashion, he decried, any Christian gentleman could
“strangle or poison his beautiful, diligent, virtuous, intelligent,
amiable, and lawful wife, and then unite his destinies with the most filthy,
diseased, abandoned harlot he can find.” The Southern oligarchy
was, to Anderson’s view, the Delilah to his Union Samson. Was
secession not horrible enough that Vallandigham wanted it to happen
all over again? History had proven that the “let us alone” argument
of the South was a canard. After all that had transpired and amid
declarations from both sides to such conflicting ideas of social
organization, these two sections could not coexist as separate nations.
One idea had to prevail. Anderson emphasized that he did not want
to prosecute the war and crush the rebellion out of feelings of revenge
for the injuries that the South had caused him. On the contrary, it
pained him to contemplate the ruin of his native land. He still loved
the Southern people. He just hated their treason.
⁷

A similar meeting took place in Columbus, Ohio, on March 3.
Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was the keynote speaker.
He was still a Democrat, Johnson explained, but any Democrat who
talked of compromise was a traitor to his country. He did not believe
in fighting a war to free the slaves, but if their emancipation was
necessary to put down the rebellion, he would do what needed to be
done in order to save the Union. As Anderson’s health improved, he
joined a bandwagon of like-minded speakers that fanned out across
the state. Public opinion was turning back toward a more vigorous
prosecution of the war,
Governor Tod wrote to
General William T.
Sherman in early March. The new Union Party, formed to bridge
the gap between abolition-leaning Republicans and conservative
Democrats who also supported the war, was a force to be reckoned
with. Anderson could wave the bloody shirt with the best of them.

Vallandigham was every bit Anderson’s equal as a speaker and
drew huge crowds of Copperheads in his bid to claim the governor’s
chair. His rhetoric became more and more incendiary, as he tested
the limits of free speech in wartime. When
General Ambrose E.
Burnside, commander of the Department of the Ohio, issued Order
Number 38, which made it illegal to criticize the Union war effort,
he took aim at Peace Democrats like Vallandigham, who were
actively undermining support for the army. Anyone convicted of aiding
the enemy, Burnside declared, was a spy and a traitor and would
suffer death. The mere act of “declaring sympathies for the enemy,”
Burnside decreed in his order, “will no longer be tolerated in this
department.” Vallandigham’s supporters relished the thought of their
champion being painted as David, clad in a garment of civil liberties,
and doing battle with one of King Lincoln’s Goliaths. A campaign
song was born:

O brothers don’t forget the time when Burnside was our fate,

And the laws were superseded by order 38.

Then, like a free-born western man,

Our Val spoke brave and true,

O when he’s chosen governor,

What will poor Burnside do?

Won’t he skedaddle,

As he’s well used to do?
⁸

Burnside did not skedaddle or even wait for the election. He took
action. The general cited quotations from Vallandigham’s speeches in
which the Democrat accused Lincoln of prosecuting the war not for
the preservation of the Union but for “the purpose of crushing out
liberty and erecting a despotism.” Vallandigham further suggested that
the president should have accepted the mediation efforts of France,
restored the Constitution as it was, and ended the war honorably.
By suggesting that Lincoln and his military authorities had acted
with “a base usurpation of arbitrary authority,” Vallandigham
encouraged resistance, discouraged enlistment, and therefore aided the
enemy. Burnside arrested Vallandigham at home in his nightclothes
on May 5. In his zeal to silence a traitor, the general created a martyr.

A military tribunal took just two days to convict Vallandigham
and sentence him to prison at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. Four
days later, former Ohio senator
George E. Pugh applied for a writ
of habeas corpus on Vallandigham’s behalf. The U.S. District Court
judge denied it. Congress, after all, had conferred the right to
suspend habeas corpus, among other war powers, to President Lincoln
two months earlier. Reaction to Vallandigham’s conviction was
immediate. The governors of New York and New Jersey howled in
protest, suggesting that the arrest was not only illegal but amounted to
“military despotism.” Lincoln was angry too, as he felt that Burnside
should have consulted him before he overreached. In an effort to
save face and mollify some of his sharpest critics, the president
altered Vallandigham’s sentence and ordered him to be deported to the
Confederate States.

Vallandigham’s supporters in Dayton were incensed. They took
out their hostility on the city’s Republican newspaper, burning the
offices of the
Dayton Journal
to the ground, along with half a city
block. Martial law was declared. Vallandigham was the former
editor of the rival
Dayton Empire
, whose editor had been shot and killed
by local Republican Henry M. Brown the previous November. In
that event a melee had followed in which the prison guards holding
Brown fired on a crowd of angry Democrats who had assaulted them
with stones. Vallandigham’s sudden martyrdom created a public
relations nightmare for Lincoln. Burnside’s rash action had spurred a
Democratic Party revival, not just in Ohio but throughout the North
and the West. National unity was threatened and the war effort
potentially compromised.

Unless Lincoln acted quickly to control popular opinion, his party
and his presidency would be in big trouble. In a stroke of public
relations genius, the president employed logic to help him out of this
predicament. Vallandigham had not been arrested because he was
a threat to the administration or the commanding general, Lincoln
emphasized. He was prosecuted “because he was damaging the army,
upon the existence of which, the life of the nation depends,” Lincoln
asked, “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while
I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to
desert?” The Democrats could hardly reply.

Another problem was that Vallandigham did not
want
to join the
rebels, and the Confederate government did not want him either. “I
am a citizen of Ohio and of the United States,” he declared when he
crossed rebel lines. “I am here within your lines by force and against my
will,” he continued. “I therefore surrender myself to you as a prisoner
of war.”
Jefferson Davis did not know quite what to do with this odd
character, so he invoked the same law as he had used with Anderson
two years earlier. Vallandigham was declared an “alien enemy” and
transported under guard to Wilmington, North Carolina. As soon
as he could arrange his own exodus from the South, Vallandigham
hopped aboard a blockade-runner to Bermuda and made his way to
Canada. Having become the most famous American exile, he relished
the attention. Visitors frequented his new campaign headquarters at
a hotel in Windsor, Ontario, where he formally declared his intention
to run for Ohio’s governorship in absentia. As Republicans vilified
Vallandigham, Ohio Democrats rose to defend his honor.
⁹

T
HE OHIO DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
opened on June 11,
1863, to a buzz like few meetings in the history of the Buckeye
State. Everyone was talking about Clement Vallandigham.
Party leaders like
Samuel S. Cox and
George W. Maypenny were
convinced that Vallandigham’s nomination would be the death knell for
the Democrats. The rank and file, however, worshipped him. When
it came time to decide the nomination, the result was never in doubt.
Vallandigham carried the convention by a vote of 411 to 11. One of
his disciples published a long poem in the
Hamilton True Telegraph
a few days after the convention. Titled “Vallandigham: The Bastiled
Hero,” the rhyme began and ended with verses that, although not
models of literary achievement, were heartfelt expressions of
affection for their newly beatified champion:

They bore him to a gloomy cell,

And barred him from the light,

Because he dared to tell

The people what was right.

 

Lift up thy head, O martyred brave,

Thy chains shall broken be,

The people come their friend to save—

Look up, thou shall be free.
¹

Anderson and his Union Party allies were concerned. They had
recently witnessed public opinion turn on a dime, producing
catastrophic results. Key Southern states such as Georgia were split evenly
on the eve of secession just two years earlier. Voters there experienced
a tide of emotion that led to overwhelming majorities for disunion.
What Union supporters needed was a solid coalition of Republicans
and “War Democrats” to keep Ohio voters focused on defeating the
Confederacy and reuniting the country. They found their new leader
in a most unexpected place.

John Brough was a lifelong Democrat who had opposed Lincoln’s
election in 1860 and had indicated that he would likely do so again in
1864. Brough was the president of the Bellefontaine and Indianapolis
Railroad. He spent most of his time in Indiana but maintained his
former home in Cleveland. On June 10, he gave an address in Ohio
urging his fellow Democrats to support the administration’s war
for the good of the country. Lincoln was the commander in chief.
Brough reasoned, “Like a soldier in the ranks I hold it to be my duty
to obey him  .  .  .  without questioning his policy in this great
contest.” It was just the kind of simple and sincere profession of faith for
which the Ohio press had been waiting for. Two Cincinnati dailies,
the
Commercial
and the
Enquirer
, printed the speech and took up
the call for Brough’s nomination. Even radicals in the Union Leagues
jumped on the Brough bandwagon, as they did not stand a chance of
having one of their true believers win in the fractious environment.
Brough secured the nomination over incumbent governor David Tod
on the first ballot.
²

Although Brough was an accomplished orator and respected
businessman, prosperity had greatly enlarged his waistline. He cut a rather
portly figure when compared to the tall, handsome Vallandigham.
The new Union Party candidate needed a running mate who could
compete on the stump with Vallandigham and the Democrat’s
candidate for lieutenant governor,
George E. Pugh. The attractive
forty-one-year-old Pugh was a decorated veteran of the Mexican war,
a former U.S. senator, and a well-respected attorney. With the very
future of national unity seeming to rest on the fall elections, Union
Party leaders desired a candidate whose own record of support for the
Union cause was exemplary. They selected Charles Anderson.
³