Negro Soldiers--Fort Pillow--Retaliation--Draft--Northern
Democrats--Governor Seymour's Attitude--Draft Riots in New
York--Vallandigham--Lincoln on his Authority to Suspend Writ of Habeas
Corpus--Knights of the Golden Circle--Jacob Thompson in Canada
On the subject of negro soldiers, as on many other topics, the period of
active rebellion and civil war had wrought a profound change in public
opinion. From the foundation of the government to the Rebellion, the
horrible nightmare of a possible slave insurrection had brooded over the
entire South. This feeling naturally had a sympathetic reflection in the
North, and at first produced an instinctive shrinking from any thought
of placing arms in the hands of the blacks whom the chances of war had
given practical or legal freedom. During the year 1862, a few sporadic
efforts were made by zealous individuals, under apparently favoring
conditions, to begin the formation of colored regiments. The eccentric
Senator Lane tried it in Kansas, or, rather, along the Missouri border
without success. General Hunter made an experiment in South Carolina,
but found the freedmen too unwilling to enlist, and the white officers
too prejudiced to instruct them. General Butler, at New Orleans, infused
his wonted energy into a similar attempt, with somewhat better results.
He found that before the capture of the city, Governor Moore of
Louisiana had begun the organization of a regiment of free colored men
for local defense. Butler resuscitated this organization for which he
thus had the advantage of Confederate example and precedent, and against
which the accusation of arming slaves could not be urged. Early in
September, Butler reported, with his usual biting sarcasm:
"I shall also have within ten days a regiment, one thousand strong, of
native guards (colored), the darkest of whom will be about the
complexion of the late Mr. Webster."
All these efforts were made under implied, rather than expressed
provisions of law, and encountered more or less embarrassment in
obtaining pay and supplies, because they were not distinctly recognized
in the army regulations. This could not well be done so long as the
President considered the policy premature. His spirit of caution in this
regard was set forth by the Secretary of War in a letter of instruction
dated July 3, 1862:
"He is of opinion," wrote Mr. Stanton, "that under the laws of Congress,
they [the former slaves] cannot be sent back to their masters; that in
common humanity they must not be permitted to suffer for want of food,
shelter, or other necessaries of life; that to this end they should be
provided for by the quartermaster's and commissary's departments, and
that those who are capable of labor should be set to work and paid
reasonable wages. In directing this to be done, the President does not
mean, at present, to settle any general rule in respect to slaves or
slavery, but simply to provide for the particular case under the
circumstances in which it is now presented."
All this was changed by the final proclamation of emancipation, which
authoritatively announced that persons of suitable condition, whom it
declared free, would be received into the armed service of the United
States. During the next few months, the President wrote several personal
letters to General Dix, commanding at Fortress Monroe; to Andrew
Johnson, military governor of Tennessee; to General Banks, commanding at
New Orleans; and to General Hunter, in the Department of the South,
urging their attention to promoting the new policy; and, what was yet
more to the purpose, a bureau was created in the War Department having
special charge of the duty, and the adjutant-general of the army was
personally sent to the Union camps on the Mississippi River to
superintend the recruitment and enlistment of the negroes, where, with
the hearty coöperation of General Grant and other Union commanders, he
met most encouraging and gratifying success.
The Confederate authorities made a great outcry over the new departure.
They could not fail to see the immense effect it was destined to have in
the severe military struggle, and their prejudice of generations greatly
intensified the gloomy apprehensions they no doubt honestly felt. Yet
even allowing for this, the exaggerated language in which they described
it became absolutely ludicrous. The Confederate War Department early
declared Generals Hunter and Phelps to be outlaws, because they were
drilling and organizing slaves; and the sensational proclamation issued
by Jefferson Davis on December 23, 1862, ordered that Butler and his
commissioned officers, "robbers and criminals deserving death, ... be,
whenever captured, reserved for execution."
Mr. Lincoln's final emancipation proclamation excited them to a still
higher frenzy. The Confederate Senate talked of raising the black flag;
Jefferson Davis's message stigmatized it as "the most execrable measure
recorded in the history of guilty man"; and a joint resolution of the
Confederate Congress prescribed that white officers of negro Union
soldiers "shall, if captured, be put to death, or be otherwise punished
at the discretion of the court." The general orders of some subordinate
Confederate commanders repeated or rivaled such denunciations and
threats.
Fortunately, the records of the war are not stained with either excesses
by the colored troops or even a single instance of such proclaimed
barbarity upon white Union officers; and the visitation of vengeance
upon negro soldiers is confined, so far as known, to the single instance
of the massacre at Fort Pillow. In that deplorable affair, the
Confederate commander reported, by telegraph, that in thirty minutes he
stormed a fort manned by seven hundred, and captured the entire garrison
killing five hundred and taking one hundred prisoners while he sustained
a loss of only twenty killed and sixty wounded. It is unnecessary to
explain that the bulk of the slain were colored soldiers. Making due
allowance for the heat of battle, history can considerately veil closer
scrutiny into the realities wrapped in the exaggerated boast of such a
victory.
The Fort Pillow incident, which occurred in the spring of 1864, brought
upon President Lincoln the very serious question of enforcing an order
of retaliation which had been issued on July 30, 1863, as an answer to
the Confederate joint resolution of May 1. Mr. Lincoln's freedom from
every trace of passion was as conspicuous in this as in all his official
acts. In a little address at Baltimore, while referring to the rumor of
the massacre which had just been received, Mr. Lincoln said:
"We do not to-day know that a colored soldier, or white officer
commanding colored soldiers, has been massacred by the rebels when made
a prisoner. We fear it, believe it, I may say, but we do not know it. To
take the life of one of their prisoners on the assumption that they
murder ours, when it is short of certainty that they do murder ours,
might be too serious, too cruel, a mistake."
When more authentic information arrived, the matter was very earnestly
debated by the assembled cabinet; but the discussion only served to
bring out in stronger light the inherent dangers of either course. In
this nice balancing of weighty reasons, two influences decided the
course of the government against retaliation. One was that General Grant
was about to begin his memorable campaign against Richmond, and that it
would be most impolitic to preface a great battle by the tragic
spectacle of a military punishment, however justifiable. The second was
the tender-hearted humanity of the ever merciful President. Frederick
Douglass has related the answer Mr. Lincoln made to him in a
conversation nearly a year earlier:
"I shall never forget the benignant expression of his face, the tearful
look of his eye, and the quiver in his voice when he deprecated a resort
to retaliatory measures. 'Once begun,' said he, 'I do not know where
such a measure would stop.' He said he could not take men out and kill
them in cold blood for what was done by others. If he could get hold of
the persons who were guilty of killing the colored prisoners in cold
blood, the case would be different, but he could not kill the innocent
for the guilty."
Amid the sanguinary reports and crowding events that held public
attention for a year, from the Wilderness to Appomattox, the Fort Pillow
affair was forgotten, not only by the cabinet, but by the country.
The related subjects of emancipation and negro soldiers would doubtless
have been discussed with much more passion and friction, had not public
thought been largely occupied during the year 1863 by the enactment of
the conscription law and the enforcement of the draft. In the hard
stress of politics and war during the years 1861 and 1862, the popular
enthusiasm with which the free States responded to the President's call
to put down the rebellion by force of arms had become measurably
exhausted. The heavy military reverses which attended the failure of
McClellan's campaign against Richmond, Pope's defeat at the second Bull
Run, McClellan's neglect to follow up the drawn battle of Antietam with
energetic operations, the gradual change of early Western victories to a
cessation of all effort to open the Mississippi, and the scattering of
the Western forces to the spiritless routine of repairing and guarding
long railroad lines, all operated together practically to stop
volunteering and enlistment by the end of 1862.
Thus far, the patriotic record was a glorious one. Almost one hundred
thousand three months' militia had shouldered muskets to redress the
fall of Fort Sumter; over half a million three years' volunteers
promptly enlisted to form the first national army under the laws of
Congress passed in August, 1861; nearly half a million more volunteers
came forward under the tender of the governors of free States and the
President's call of July, 1862, to repair the failure of McClellan's
Peninsula campaign. Several minor calls for shorter terms of enlistment,
aggregating more than forty thousand, are here omitted for brevity's
sake. Had the Western victories continued, had the Mississippi been
opened, had the Army of the Potomac been more fortunate, volunteering
would doubtless have continued at quite or nearly the same rate. But
with success delayed, with campaigns thwarted, with public sentiment
despondent, armies ceased to fill. An emergency call for three hundred
thousand nine months' men, issued on August 4, 1862, produced a total of
only eighty-six thousand eight hundred and sixty; and an attempt to
supply these in some of the States by a draft under State laws
demonstrated that mere local statutes and machinery for that form of
military recruitment were defective and totally inadequate.
With the beginning of the third year of the war, more energetic measures
to fill the armies were seen to be necessary; and after very hot and
acrimonious debate for about a month, Congress, on March 3, 1863, passed
a national conscription law, under which all male citizens between the
ages of twenty and forty-five were enrolled to constitute the national
forces, and the President was authorized to call them into service by
draft as occasion might require. The law authorized the appointment of a
provost-marshal-general, and under him a provost-marshal, a
commissioner, and a surgeon, to constitute a board of enrollment in each
congressional district; who, with necessary deputies, were required to
carry out the law by national authority, under the supervision of the
provost-marshal-general.
For more than a year past, the Democratic leaders in the Northern States
had assumed an attitude of violent partizanship against the
administration, their hostility taking mainly the form of stubborn
opposition to the antislavery enactments of Congress and the
emancipation measures of the President. They charged with loud
denunciation that he was converting the maintenance of the Union into a
war for abolition, and with this and other clamors had gained
considerable successes in the autumn congressional elections of 1862,
though not enough to break the Republican majority in the House of
Representatives. General McClellan was a Democrat, and, since his
removal from command, they proclaimed him a martyr to this policy, and
were grooming him to be their coming presidential candidate.
The passage of the conscription law afforded them a new pretext to
assail the administration; and Democratic members of both Houses of
Congress denounced it with extravagant partizan bitterness as a
violation of the Constitution, and subversive of popular liberty. In the
mouths of vindictive cross-roads demagogues, and in the columns of
irresponsible newspapers that supply the political reading among the
more reckless elements of city populations, the extravagant language of
Democratic leaders degenerated in many instances into unrestrained abuse
and accusation. Yet, considering that this was the first conscription
law ever enacted in the United States, considering the multitude of
questions and difficulties attending its application, considering that
the necessity of its enforcement was, in the nature of things, unwelcome
to the friends of the government, and, as naturally, excited all the
enmity and cunning of its foes to impede, thwart, and evade it, the law
was carried out with a remarkably small proportion of delay,
obstruction, or resulting violence.
Among a considerable number of individual violations of the act, in
which prompt punishment prevented a repetition, only two prominent
incidents arose which had what may be called a national significance. In
the State of New York the partial political reaction of 1862 had caused
the election of Horatio Seymour, a Democrat, as governor. A man of high
character and great ability, he, nevertheless, permitted his partizan
feeling to warp and color his executive functions to a dangerous
extent. The spirit of his antagonism is shown in a phrase of his
fourth-of-July oration:
"The Democratic organization look upon this administration as hostile to
their rights and liberties; they look upon their opponents as men who
would do them wrong in regard to their most sacred franchises."
Believing--perhaps honestly--the conscription law to be
unconstitutional, he endeavored, by protest, argument and administrative
non-compliance, to impede its execution on the plea of first demanding a
Supreme Court decision as to its legality. To this President Lincoln
replied:
"I cannot consent to suspend the draft in New York, as you request,
because, among other reasons, time is too important.... I do not object
to abide a decision of the United States Supreme Court, or of the judges
thereof, on the constitutionality of the draft law. In fact, I should be
willing to facilitate the obtaining of it; but I cannot consent to lose
the time while it is being obtained. 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 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."
Notwithstanding Governor Seymour's neglect to give the enrolling
officers any coöperation, preparations for the draft went on in New York
city without prospect of serious disturbance, except the incendiary
language of low newspapers and handbills. But scarcely had the wheel
begun to turn, and the drawing commenced on July 13, when a sudden riot
broke out. First demolishing the enrolling-office, the crowd next
attacked an adjoining block of stores, which they plundered and set on
fire, refusing to let the firemen put out the flames. From this point
the excitement and disorder spread over the city, which for three days
was at many points subjected to the uncontrolled fury of the mob. Loud
threats to destroy the New York "Tribune" office, which the inmates as
vigorously prepared to defend, were made. The most savage brutality was
wreaked upon colored people. The fine building of the colored Orphan
Asylum, where several hundred children barely found means of escape, was
plundered and set on fire. It was notable that foreigners of recent
importation were the principal leaders and actors in this lawlessness in
which two million dollars worth of property was destroyed, and several
hundred persons lost their lives.
The disturbance came to an end on the night of the fourth day, when a
small detachment of soldiers met a body of rioters, and firing into
them, killed thirteen, and wounded eighteen more. Governor Seymour gave
but little help in the disorder, and left a stain on the record of his
courage by addressing a portion of the mob as "my friends." The
opportune arrival of national troops restored, and thereafter
maintained, quiet and safety.
Some temporary disturbance occurred in Boston, but was promptly put
down, and loud appeals came from Philadelphia and Chicago to stop the
draft. The final effect of the conscription law was not so much to
obtain recruits for the service, as to stimulate local effort throughout
the country to promote volunteering, whereby the number drafted was
either greatly lessened or, in many localities, entirely avoided by
filling the State quotas.
The military arrest of Clement L. Vallandigham, a Democratic member of
Congress from Ohio, for incendiary language denouncing the draft, also
grew to an important incident. Arrested and tried under the orders of
General Burnside, a military commission found him guilty of having
violated General Order No. 38, by "declaring disloyal sentiments and
opinions with the object and purpose of weakening the power of the
government in its efforts to suppress an unlawful rebellion"; and
sentenced him to military confinement during the war. Judge Leavitt of
the United States Circuit Court denied a writ of _habeas corpus_ in the
case. President Lincoln regretted the arrest, but felt it imprudent to
annul the action of the general and the military tribunal. Conforming to
a clause of Burnside's order, he modified the sentence by sending
Vallandigham south beyond the Union military lines. The affair created a
great sensation, and, in a spirit of party protest, the Ohio Democrats
unanimously nominated Vallandigham for governor. Vallandigham went to
Richmond, held a conference with the Confederate authorities, and, by
way of Bermuda, went to Canada, from whence he issued a political
address. The Democrats of both Ohio and New York took up the political
and legal discussion with great heat, and sent imposing committees to
present long addresses to the President on the affair.
Mr. Lincoln made long written replies to both addresses of which only so
much needs quoting here as concisely states his interpretation of his
authority to suspend the privilege of the writ of _habeas corpus_:
"You ask, in substance, whether I really claim that I may override all
the guaranteed rights of individuals, on the plea of conserving the
public safety--when I may choose to say the public safety requires it.
This question, divested of the phraseology calculated to represent me
as struggling for an arbitrary personal prerogative, is either simply a
question who shall decide or an affirmation that nobody shall decide,
what the public safety does require in cases of rebellion or invasion.
The Constitution contemplates the question as likely to occur for
decision, but it does not expressly declare who is to decide it. By
necessary implication, when rebellion or invasion comes, the decision is
to be made from time to time; and I think the man whom, for the time,
the people have, under the Constitution, made the commander-in-chief of
their army and navy, is the man who holds the power and bears the
responsibility of making it. If he uses the power justly, the same
people will probably justify him; if he abuses it, he is in their hands,
to be dealt with by all the modes they have reserved to themselves in
the Constitution."
Forcible and convincing as was this legal analysis, a single sympathetic
phrase of the President's reply had a much greater popular effect:
"Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts while I must not
touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?"
The term so accurately described the character of Vallandigham, and the
pointed query so touched the hearts of the Union people throughout the
land whose favorite "soldier boys" had volunteered to fill the Union
armies, that it rendered powerless the crafty criticism of party
diatribes. The response of the people of Ohio was emphatic. At the
October election Vallandigham was defeated by more than one hundred
thousand majority.
In sustaining the arrest of Vallandigham, President Lincoln had acted
not only within his constitutional, but also strictly within his legal,
authority. In the preceding March, Congress had passed an act
legalizing all orders of this character made by the President at any
time during the rebellion, and accorded him full indemnity for all
searches, seizures, and arrests or imprisonments made under his orders.
The act also provided:
"That, during the present rebellion, the President of the United States,
whenever in his judgment the public safety may require it, is authorized
to suspend the privilege of the writ of _habeas corpus_ in any case,
throughout the United States or any part thereof."
About the middle of September, Mr. Lincoln's proclamation formally put
the law in force, to obviate any hindering or delaying the prompt
execution of the draft law.
Though Vallandigham and the Democrats of his type were unable to prevent
or even delay the draft, they yet managed to enlist the sympathies and
secure the adhesion of many uneducated and unthinking men by means of
secret societies, known as "Knights of the Golden Circle," "The Order of
American Knights," "Order of the Star," "Sons of Liberty," and by other
equally high-sounding names, which they adopted and discarded in turn,
as one after the other was discovered and brought into undesired
prominence. The titles and grips and passwords of these secret military
organizations, the turgid eloquence of their meetings, and the
clandestine drill of their oath-bound members, doubtless exercised quite
as much fascination on such followers as their unlawful object of aiding
and abetting the Southern cause. The number of men thus enlisted in the
work of inducing desertion among Union soldiers, fomenting resistance to
the draft, furnishing the Confederates with arms, and conspiring to
establish a Northwestern Confederacy in full accord with the South,
which formed the ultimate dream of their leaders, is hard to determine.
Vallandigham, the real head of the movement, claimed five hundred
thousand, and Judge Holt, in an official report, adopted that as being
somewhere near the truth, though others counted them at a full million.
The government, cognizant of their existence, and able to produce
abundant evidence against the ring-leaders whenever it chose to do so,
wisely paid little heed to these dark-lantern proceedings, though, as
was perhaps natural, military officers commanding the departments in
which they were most numerous were inclined to look upon them more
seriously; and Governor Morton of Indiana was much disquieted by their
work in his State.
Mr. Lincoln's attitude toward them was one of good-humored contempt.
"Nothing can make me believe that one hundred thousand Indiana Democrats
are disloyal," he said; and maintained that there was more folly than
crime in their acts. Indeed, though prolific enough of oaths and
treasonable utterances, these organizations were singularly lacking in
energy and initiative. Most of the attempts made against the public
peace in the free States and along the northern border came, not from
resident conspirators, but from Southern emissaries and their Canadian
sympathizers; and even these rarely rose above the level of ordinary
arson and highway robbery.
Jacob Thompson, who had been Secretary of the Interior under President
Buchanan, was the principal agent of the Confederate government in
Canada, where he carried on operations as remarkable for their
impracticability as for their malignity. One plan during the summer of
1864 contemplated nothing less than seizing and holding the three great
States of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, with the aid of disloyal
Democrats, whereupon it was supposed Missouri and Kentucky would
quickly join them and make an end of the war.
Becoming convinced, when this project fell through, that nothing could
be expected from Northern Democrats he placed his reliance on Canadian
sympathizers, and turned his attention to liberating the Confederate
prisoners confined on Johnson's Island in Sandusky Bay and at Camp
Douglas near Chicago. But both these elaborate schemes, which embraced
such magnificent details as capturing the war steamer _Michigan_ on Lake
Erie, came to naught. Nor did the plans to burn St. Louis and New York,
and to destroy steamboats on the Mississippi River, to which he also
gave his sanction, succeed much better. A very few men were tried and
punished for these and similar crimes, despite the voluble protest of
the Confederate government but the injuries he and his agents were able
to inflict, like the acts of the Knights of the Golden Circle on the
American side of the border, amounted merely to a petty annoyance, and
never reached the dignity of real menace to the government.