Every great revolution among Anglo-Saxon people--perhaps among all
people--has produced strange types of dreamers. In America, however,
neither section could claim a monopoly of such types, and even the
latter-day visionaries who can see everything in heaven and earth,
excepting fact, had their Northern and Southern originals in the time
of the great American war. Among these is a strange congregation which
assembled in the spring of 1864 and which has come to be known, from its
place of meeting, as the Cleveland Convention. Its coming together was
the result of a loose cooperation among several minor political groups,
all of which were for the Union and the war, and violently opposed to
Lincoln. So far as they had a common purpose, it was to supplant Lincoln
by Fremont in the next election.
The Convention was notable for the large proportion of agnostics among
its members. A motion was made to amend a resolution that "the Rebellion
must be put down" by adding the words "with God's assistance." This
touch of piety was stormily rejected. Another group represented at
Cleveland was made up of extreme abolitionists under the leadership of
that brilliant but disordered genius, Wendell Phillips. He sent a letter
denouncing Lincoln and pledging his support of Fremont because of the
latter's "clearsighted statesmanship and rare military ability." The
convention declared itself a political party, under the style of the
Radical Democracy, and nominated Fremont for President.
There was another body of dreamers, still more singular, who were also
bitter opponents of Lincoln. They were, however, not in favor of war.
Their political machinery consisted of secret societies. As early as
1860, the Knights of the Golden Circle were active in Indiana, where
they did yeoman service for Breckinridge. Later this society acquired
some underground influence in other States, especially in Ohio, and did
its share in bringing about the victories at the polls in the autumn of
1862, when the Democrats captured the Indiana legislature.
The most serious charge against the Golden Circle was complicity in an
attempt to assassinate Oliver P. Morton, Governor of Indiana, who was
fired at, one night, as he was leaving the state house. When Morton
demanded an investigation of the Golden Circle, the legislature refused
to sanction it. On his own authority and with Federal aid he made
investigations and published a report which, if it did not actually
prove treason, came dangerously near to proof. Thereafter, this society
drops out of sight, and its members appear to have formed the new Order
of the American Knights, which in its turn was eclipsed by the Sons
of Liberty. There were several other such societies all organized on a
military plan and with a great pretense of arming their members. This,
however, had to be done surreptitiously. Boxes of rifles purchased
in the East were shipped West labeled "Sunday-school books," and
negotiations were even undertaken with the Confederacy to bring in arms
by way of Canada. At a meeting of the supreme council of the Sons of
Liberty, in New York, February 22, 1864, it was claimed that the order
had nearly a million members, though the Government secret service
considered half a million a more exact estimate.
As events subsequently proved, the societies were not as formidable as
these figures would imply. Most of the men who joined them seem to have
been fanciful creatures who loved secrecy for its own sake. While real
men, North and South, were laying down their lives for their principles,
these make-believe men were holding bombastic initiations and taking
oaths such as this from the ritual of the American Knights: "I do
further solemnly promise and swear, that I will ever cherish the sublime
lessons which the sacred emblems of our order suggest, and will, so far
as in me lies, impart those lessons to the people of the earth, where
the mystic acorn falls from its parent bough, in whose visible firmament
Orion, Arcturus, and the Pleiades ride in their cold resplendent
glories, and where the Southern Cross dazzles the eye of degraded
humanity with its coruscations of golden light, fit emblem of Truth,
while it invites our sacred order to consecrate her temples in the four
corners of the earth, where moral darkness reigns and despotism holds
sway.... Divine essence, so help me that I fail not in my troth, lest
I shall be summoned before the tribunal of the order, adjudged and
condemned to certain and shameful death, while my name shall be recorded
on the rolls of infamy. Amen."
The secret orders fought hard to prevent the Lincoln victory in the
elections of 1863. Even before that time their leaders had talked
mysteriously of another disruption of the Union and the formation of
a Northwestern Confederacy in alliance with the South. The scheme was
known to the Confederates, allusions to it are to be found in Southern
newspapers, and even the Confederate military authorities considered it.
Early in 1863, General Beauregard thought the Confederates might "get
into Ohio and call upon the friends of Vallandigham to rise for his
defense and support; then...call upon the whole Northwest to join in the
movement, form a confederacy of their own, and join us by a treaty
of alliance, offensive and defensive." Reliance on the support of the
societies was the will-o'-the-wisp that deceived General John Morgan
in his desperate attempt to carry out Beauregard's programme. Though
brushed aside as a mere detail by military historians, Morgan's raid,
with his force of irregular cavalry, in July, 1863, through Indiana and
Ohio, was one of the most romantic episodes of the war. But it ended
in his defeat and capture. While his gallant troopers rode to their
destruction, the men who loved to swear by Arcturus and to gabble about
the Pleiades showed the fiber to be expected of such people, and stayed
snug in their beds.
But neither their own lack of hardihood nor the disasters of their
Southern friends could dampen their peculiar ardor. Their hero was
Vallandigham. That redoubtable person had fixed his headquarters in
Canada, whence he directed his partisans in their vain attempt to elect
him Governor of Ohio. Their next move was to honor him with the office
of Supreme Commander of the Sons of Liberty, and now Vallandigham
resolved to win the martyr's crown in very fact. In June, 1864, he
prepared for the dramatic effect by carefully advertising his intention
and came home. But to his great disappointment Lincoln ignored him, and
the dramatic martyrdom which he had planned did not come off.
There still existed the possibility of a great uprising, and to that
end arrangements were made with Southern agents in Canada. Confederate
soldiers, picked men, made their way in disguise to Chicago. There the
worshipers of Arcturus were to join them in a mighty multitude; the
Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas in Chicago were to be liberated;
around that core of veterans, the hosts of the Pleiades were to
rally. All this was to coincide with the assembling at Chicago of the
Democratic national convention, in which Vallandigham was to appear. The
organizers of the conspiracy dreamed that the two events might coalesce;
that the convention might be stampeded by their uprising; that a
great part, if not the whole, of the convention would endorse the
establishment of a Northwestern Confederacy.
Alas for him who builds on the frame of mind that delights in cheap
rhetoric while Rome is afire! At the moment of hazard, the Sons of
Liberty showed the white feather, were full of specious words, would not
act. The Confederate soldiers, indignant at this second betrayal, had to
make their escape from the country.
It must not be supposed that this Democratic national convention was
made up altogether of Secessionists. The peace party was still, as
in the previous year, a strange complex, a mixture of all sorts and
conditions. Its cohesion was not so much due to its love of peace as to
its dislike of Lincoln and its hatred of his party. Vallandigham was
a member of the committee on resolutions. The permanent chairman was
Governor Seymour of New York. The Convention was called to order by
August Belmont, a foreigner by birth, the American representative of the
Rothschilds. He was the head and front of that body of Northern capital
which had so long financed the South and which had always opposed the
war. In opening the Convention he said: "Four years of misrule by a
sectional, fanatical, and corrupt party have brought our country to the
verge of ruin." In the platform Lincoln was accused of a list of crimes
which it had become the habit of the peace party to charge against
him. His administration was described as "four years of failure," and
McClellan was nominated for President.
The Republican managers called a convention at Baltimore in June, 1864,
with a view to organizing a composite Union Party in which the War
Democrats were to participate. Their plan was successful. The second
place on the Union ticket was accepted by a War Democrat, Andrew
Johnson, of Tennessee. Lincoln was renominated, though not without
opposition, and he was so keenly aware that he was not the unanimous
choice of the Union Party that he permitted the fact to appear in a
public utterance soon afterward. "I do not allow myself," he said, in
addressing a delegation of the National Union League, "to suppose that
either the Convention or the League have concluded to decide that I am
either the greatest or the best man in America, but rather they have
concluded it is not best to swap horses while crossing the river, and
have further concluded that I am not so poor a horse that they might not
make a botch of it in trying to swap."
But the Union Party was so far from being a unit that during the summer
factional quarrels developed within its ranks. All the elements
that were unfriendly to Lincoln took heart from a dispute between the
President and Congress with regard to reconstruction in Louisiana, over
a large part of which Federal troops had established a civil government
on the President's authority. As an incident in the history of
reconstruction, this whole matter has its place in another volume.* But
it also has a place in the history of the presidential campaign of
1864. Lincoln's plan of reconstruction was obnoxious to the Radicals in
Congress inasmuch as it did not definitely abolish slavery in Louisiana,
although it required the new Government to give its adherence to the
Emancipation Proclamation. Congress passed a bill taking reconstruction
out of the President's hands and definitely requiring the reconstructed
States to abolish slavery. Lincoln took the position that Congress had
no power over slavery in the States. When his Proclamation was thrown in
his teeth, he replied, "I conceive that I may in an emergency do things
on military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress."
Incidentally there was a further disagreement between the President and
the Radicals over negro suffrage. Though neither scheme provided for
it, Lincoln would extend it, if at all, only to the exceptional negroes,
while the Radicals were ready for a sweeping extension. But Lincoln
refused to sign their bill and it lapsed. Thereupon Benjamin Wade of
Ohio and Henry Winter Davis of Maryland issued a savage denunciation of
Lincoln which has been known ever since as the "Wade-Davis Manifesto".
* Walter L. Fleming, "The Sequel of Appomattox". In "The
Chronicles of America".
There was a faction in the Union Party which we may justly name the
Vindictives. The "Manifesto" gave them a rallying cry. At a conference
in New York they decided to compel the retirement of Lincoln and the
nomination of some other candidate. For this purpose a new convention
was to be called at Cincinnati in September. In the ranks of the
Vindictives at this time was the impetuous editor of the "New York
Tribune", Horace Greeley. His presence there calls for some explanation.
Perhaps the most singular figure of the time, he was one of the most
irresponsible and yet, through his paper, one of the most influential.
He had a trick of phrase which, somehow, made him appear oracular to the
plain people, especially in the rural districts--the very people on whom
Lincoln relied for a large part of his support. Greeley knew his
power, and his mind was not large enough to carry the knowledge well.
Furthermore, his was the sort of nature that relates itself to life
above all through the sensibilities. Kipling speaks scornfully of people
who if their "own front door is shut will swear the world is warm." They
are relations in the full blood of Horace Greeley.
In July, when the breach between the President and the Vindictives was
just beginning to be evident, Greeley was pursuing an adventure of his
own. Among the least sensible minor incidents of the war were a number
of fantastic attempts of private persons to negotiate peace. With
one exception they had no historic importance. The exception is a
negotiation carried on by Greeley, which seems to have been the ultimate
cause of his alliance with the Vindictives.
In the middle of July, 1864, gold was selling in New York at 285.
There was distress and discontent throughout the country. The horrible
slaughter of the Wilderness, still fresh in everybody's mind, had put
the whole Union Party into mourning. The impressionable Greeley became
frantic for peace peace at any price. At the psychological moment word
was conveyed to him that two persons in Canada held authority from
the Confederacy to enter into negotiations for peace. Greeley wrote to
Lincoln demanding negotiations because "our bleeding, bankrupt, almost
dying country longs for peace, shudders at the prospect of fresh
conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of
human blood."
Lincoln consented to a negotiation but stipulated that Greeley himself
should become responsible for its conduct. Though this was not what
Greeley wanted for his type always prefers to tell others what to
do--he sullenly accepted. He proceeded to Niagara to meet the reputed
commissioners of the Confederacy. The details of the futile conference
do not concern us. The Confederate agents were not empowered to treat
for peace--at least not on any terms that would be considered at
Washington. Their real purpose was far subtler. Appreciating the
delicate balance in Northern politics, they aimed at making it appear
that Lincoln was begging for terms. Lincoln, who foresaw this possible
turn of events, had expressly limited Greeley to negotiations for "the
integrity of the whole Union and the abandonment of slavery." Greeley
chose to believe that these instructions, and not the subtlety of the
Confederate agents and his own impulsiveness, were the cause of the
false position in which the agents now placed him. They published an
account of the episode, thus effecting an exposure which led to sharp
attacks upon Greeley by the Northern press. In the bitterness of his
mortification Greeley then went from one extreme to the other and joined
the Vindictives.
Less than three weeks after the conference at Niagara, the "Wade-Davis
Manifesto" appeared. It was communicated to the country through the
columns of Greeley's paper on the 5th of August. Greeley, who so short
a time before was for peace at any price, went the whole length of
reaction by proclaiming that "Mr. Lincoln is already beaten.... We must
have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow. If we had such
a ticket as could be made by naming Grant, Butler, or Sherman for
President and Farragut for Vice, we could make a fight yet."
At about this same time the chairman of the Republican national
committee, who was a Lincoln man, wrote to the President that the
situation was desperate. Lincoln himself is known to have made a private
memorandum containing the words, "It seems extremely probable that this
Administration will not be reelected." On the 1st of September, 1864,
with three presidential candidates in the field, Northern politics were
bewildering, and the country was shrouded in the deepest gloom. The
Wilderness campaign, after slaughter unparalleled, had not in the
popular mind achieved results. Sherman, in Georgia, though his losses
were not as terrible as Grant's, had not yet done anything to lighten
the gloom. Not even Farragut's victory in Mobile Bay, in August,
far-reaching as it proved to be, reassured the North. A bitter cry for
peace went up even from lovers of the Union whose hearts had failed.
Meanwhile, the brilliant strategist in Georgia was pressing his drive
for political as well as for military effect. To rouse those Unionists
who had lost heart was part of his purpose when he hurled his columns
against Atlanta, from which Hood was driven in one of the most
disastrous of Confederate defeats. On the 3rd of September Lincoln
issued a proclamation appointing a day of thanksgiving for these great
victories of Sherman and Farragut.
On that day, it would seem, the tide turned in Northern politics. Some
historians are content with Atlanta as the explanation of all that
followed; but there are three separate events of importance that now
occurred as incidents in the complicated situation. In the first place,
three weeks later the radical opposition had collapsed; the plan for a
new convention was abandoned; the Vindictive leaders came out in support
of Lincoln. Almost simultaneously occurred the remaining two surprising
events. Fremont withdrew from his candidacy in order to do his "part
toward preventing the election of the Democratic candidate." And Lincoln
asked for the resignation of a member of his Cabinet, Postmaster-General
Montgomery Blair, who was the especial enemy of the Vindictives.
The official biographers of Lincoln* keep these three events separate.
They hold that Blair's removal was wholly Lincoln's idea, and that from
chivalrous reasons he would not abandon his friend as long as he seemed
to be losing the game. The historian Rhodes writes confidently of a
bargain with Fremont, holding that Blair was removed to terminate a
quarrel with Fremont which dated back even to his own removal in 1861.
A possible third theory turns upon Chase, whose hostility to Blair was
quite equal to that of the illbalanced Fremont. It had been stimulated
the previous winter by a fierce arraignment of Chase made by Blair's
brother in Congress, in which Chase was bluntly accused of fraud and
of making money, or allowing his friends to make money, through illicit
trade in cotton. And Chase was a man of might among the Vindictives. The
intrigue, however, never comes to the foreground in history, but lurks
in the background thick with shadows. Once or twice among those
shadows we seem to catch a glimpse of the figure of Thurlow Weed, the
master-politician of the time. Taking one thing with another, we may
risk the guess that somehow the two radical groups which were both
relentless against Blair were led to pool their issues, and that Blair's
removal was the price Lincoln paid not to one faction of radicals but to
the whole unmerciful crowd.
*His private secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay.
Whatever complex of purposes lay back of the triple coincidence, the
latter part of September saw a general reunion of the factions within
the Union Party, followed by a swift recovery of strength. When the
election came, Lincoln received an electoral vote of 212 against 21, and
a popular vote of 2,330,552 against 1,835,985.
The inevitable question arises as to what was the real cause of this
success. It is safe to say that the political campaign contained some
adroit strategy; that Sherman was without doubt an enormous factor; that
the Democrats made numerous blunders; and that the secret societies had
an effect other than they intended. However, the real clue seems to be
found in one sentence from a letter written by Lowell to Motley when the
outlook for his party was darkest: "The mercantile classes are longing
for peace, but I believe that the people are more firm than ever." Of
the great, silent mass of the people, the true temper seems to be struck
off in a popular poem of the time, written in response to one of the
calls for more troops, a poem with refrains built on the model of this
couplet:
"We're coming from the hillside, we're coming from the shore, We're
coming, Father Abraham, six hundred thousand more."