THE STATE OF THINGS AFTER GETTYSBURG
The summer of 1863 presented the most interesting epoch of the war. The
baffling of Lee's second attempt to invade the North left the struggle
in Virginia about as it had been before, except that Lee's veteran army
continued to grow steadily stronger in morale and weaker in numbers.
The operations at the West, however, had been very disastrous to the
Confederates. Their chief city had been taken and was firmly held.
Their armies had been driven out of Missouri, Kentucky and the greater
part of Tennessee. The Mississippi river had been completely wrested
from their possession and the Confederacy had been cut in two.
Some critics, writing at a later time, have held that these conditions
demanded the abandonment of the Confederate cause, and called for a
suit for peace on the part of the Southerners, upon whatever terms the
Federal Government might be willing to grant. Those who take this view
do so, it would seem, upon inadequate conceptions of the conditions and
the facts. Had the South been a European country, with all its problems
of military geography wrought out, with its strategic positions marked
upon myriads of maps, with all lines of communication definitely
settled and fixed, the situation at midsummer in 1863 might well
have justified an opinion of this kind. But none of these conditions
existed. The South was still possessed of a vast area unplatted for
military purposes, abounding in obstacles that might be made effective
against any adversary's advance. Still more important, there remained
the spirit of the army and an unconquerable determination on the part
of the people to exhaust every conceivable resource before surrendering
a cause which they believed to be absolutely and eternally right.
They had been fed in childhood and youth upon the memories and
traditions of American history; they had learned well the lesson that
the battle is not always to the strong; they did not forget those dark
hours of the American Revolution when Washington, with a small, ragged
and mutinous army, lay at Valley Forge while the British occupied New
York and Philadelphia and were threatening to overrun Virginia, Georgia
and the Carolinas. It was their fixed belief that their own cause in
this Confederate war was identical with that of their Revolutionary
forefathers, and they would have held themselves in contempt had
they shown a readier spirit of surrender than that of the earlier
Americans. They remembered how even after the British had conquered
Charleston and Savannah, and with superior forces had overrun Georgia
and the Carolinas, some mere handfuls of determined men under Marion,
Sumter, Pickens, Horry and their kind, had kept war alive in those
regions until such time as Greene should come and by masterful strategy
make his own defeats more effective than victories, and ultimately
reconquer their country from its conquerors, thus making American
independence possible. The Confederate people, in their manhood,
believed in and acted upon that American history which they had learned
in their youth. Reverses only stimulated them to new endeavors, and a
more heroic endurance.
Finally, there remained the Army of Northern Virginia, under command
of Robert E. Lee. For them to have abandoned their cause while such an
army under such a commander was still in the field would have been a
confession of weakness and cowardice wholly beyond conception by such
men. The war was not yet over. The men who were fighting it on the side
of the South were still so potent in arms that in that very month of
July, 1863, the Government of the United States found it necessary to
resort to an enforced draft in order to raise the 300,000 men called
for three months before, to reinforce armies that already outnumbered
those of the South by two to one and more.
So far was the Confederacy at that time from defeat and the necessity
of surrender that for a space it was exceedingly uncertain whether or
not the North would furnish the quotas now called for. So small was
the confidence of the North in the administration, and in the success
of its methods, that in some parts of the country volunteering had
practically come to an end.
As has been pointed out in a former chapter, there was a party
at the North, only slightly inferior in strength to that of the
administration, which determinedly opposed the further prosecution of
the war. This opposition was in part political and in part economic.
On its economic side it enlisted all those men who had business
interests or business hopes connected with the Southern trade. On its
political side it included all men at the North who were opposed to the
policies and the principles of the Republican party. It included also a
vast multitude of men who had from their youth up hated Abolitionism,
and detested the thought of negro equality in this land.
Still another force, and not a small one, had its influence. There were
men of earnest minds, throughout the North, who seriously apprehended
the undermining of the Constitution and the destruction of liberty
in our country by the exercise of what are called war powers. These
men were genuinely and patriotically alarmed when they saw the power
of the National Government used to suspend the habeas corpus--that
traditional bulwark of personal liberty the existence of which has been
for many centuries regarded by all English-speaking men as their most
priceless possession. When these men saw in addition a declaration of
martial law, and the establishment of a system of passports as rigid
as that of any military despotism, and when at last they saw the
administration openly assuming and exercising the power of overturning
the institutions of states by mere executive proclamation, they grew
gravely alarmed for liberty itself. To them it seemed--rightly or
wrongly--that in the struggle to free the negro slaves of the South
there was very serious danger of incurring the loss of liberty to
all men in this Republic. Being unwilling to exchange all that is
fundamental in the Republic for the freeing of some negro slaves these
earnest thinkers,--whether mistakenly or not,--opposed with all their
might the further progress of the war and sought in every legal and
constitutional way to make an end of it.
This then was the situation. The North had armies in the field vastly
outnumbering those of its adversary and immeasurably better equipped
and supplied. But public sentiment at the South was a unit, while the
North in its political views was a house divided against itself. For
the South to have abandoned its cause at such a time and under such
circumstances merely by reason of military reverses, when it still had
in the field some hundreds of thousands of veteran troops, would have
been an act of cowardice inconceivable to American men.
In New York City there was a complete failure to make adequate response
to Mr. Lincoln's demand for further troops. Either the government must
go without the important quota from the principal city in the nation,
or else a draft must be ordered to make good the deficiencies in the
volunteering. This Republic of ours had always thitherto depended upon
the patriotism of its people for such strength as it might need in a
fighting way. It had several times happened that during wars against
foreign powers some parts of the country had manifested an unpatriotic
lack of enthusiasm, and had failed to furnish their quotas of
volunteers for the common defense. But there had been then no thought
of dragging men unwillingly into the military service, although there
had been great public indignation throughout the rest of the country
over the unpatriotic attitude of a part of the Union. The quotas that
some of the states refused to furnish were made good by a larger
volunteering in other parts of the country.
But in 1863 the conditions were radically different. The war for which
the new levies were wanted was a war against Americans, and not for
the defense of the nation against foreign powers. In the view of very
many men it was, rightly or wrongly, regarded as a war instigated
by a sectional, political party in the name of the nation for the
destruction of all that was fundamental in the nation. The time
has long gone by when it was worth while to argue the soundness or
unsoundness of these opinions. It is necessary now only to record the
fact of their existence in aid of an understanding of what happened.
The draft was begun in New York on the eleventh of July, 1863. That
date fell upon a Saturday. The draft had been opposed in some of the
newspapers and in public speeches as unconstitutional, and as an
invasion of those private rights which free government is instituted
among men to secure. There was murmuring and muttering throughout
the Saturday's operations and by the time that Monday came there was
throughout the city an aroused spirit of protest which threatened
violence. That violence came with a vengeance when the draft was
resumed on Monday. Angry crowds surrounded the offices in which the
drawings were to be made. The street cars were stopped and their horses
unhitched. Then the draft offices were invaded and sacked, and in some
cases the buildings were set on fire. At one point an entire block was
burned by the mob; at another point there were battles fought between
the populace and the police which rivaled in violence and in slaughter
skirmishes on the lines in Virginia. Mobs filled the streets in every
direction, and for a time had their own way. The office of the New York
"Tribune" was assailed and it was defended only by running out chutes
from which hand grenades could be dropped into the throngs below, and
by arming the printers and other employees with muskets and abundant
cartridges. The office of the "Evening Post" was defended against the
mob by steam jets shot from hose attached to the boilers that worked
the machinery and the presses.
In the meanwhile every negro who made his appearance in the street was
assaulted and eleven of them fell victims to the anger of the populace.
A negro orphan asylum in Fifth avenue at 44th street was sacked and
burned by the infuriated rioters and its helpless little wards narrowly
escaped by the way of back doors.
In Second avenue the police and soldiers were attacked from the windows
and the roofs of houses. They quickly wreaked a terrible vengeance.
They pushed their way into every house and every room of every
house, assailed everybody they could find there, whether guilty or
innocent of offense, thrust many of them through with bayonets without
inquiring as to their degree of culpability, brained many others in
like unquestioned manner with locust clubs, threw some of them over
balusters upon the stones below, hurled some out of fourth and fifth
story windows to be crushed upon the pavement, followed the fleeing
ones to the roofs, and shot them there as the most northern of northern
historians has recorded--we quote his exact language--"refusing all
mercy, and threw the quivering corpses into the street as a warning to
the mob."
All this occurred more than forty-five years ago. The war which gave
birth to such fury is a matter of history now, not of controversy. It
is not worth while nearly half a century later to inquire too curiously
into the rights and wrongs, or into the responsibilities involved in
such things. But it is perhaps of human advantage, or at the least of
curious historic interest, to note that all these things were done in
professed service to that personal liberty which free government among
men is instituted to secure.
From the point of view of the angels and other superior intelligences
there could be nothing more gruesomely ludicrous than the attitude and
condition of the American people on both sides of the war-drawn lines
at that period. On both sides men professed and honestly believed
that their supreme concern was for the maintenance--in Mr. Lincoln's
phrase--of a "government of the people, by the people and for the
people." Yet on each side there existed, and men consented to it, a
military despotism as arbitrary, as unreasoning, and as tyrannical
as that of Russia itself. On either side no man could travel without
permission of some provost authority which there was nowhere any power
to question or any court to curb. On either side that military power
which our Constitution requires to be always subordinate to the civil
arm, had laid its iron hand without even the disguise of a velvet glove
upon the fate and fortune and life of every citizen of a land supposed
to be the freest on earth. In New York men could be butchered in their
homes and thrown out of high windows without so much as the order of
a sheriff in justification. In Richmond Winder's men made practical
prisoners of all soldiers and citizens who undertook to traverse the
streets upon however laudable an occasion.
It is always thus in war. No sooner is the military power invoked in
aid of civil authority than it demands and enforces the abdication of
all civil authority in so far as that authority may interfere in the
slightest degree with its arbitrary execution of its own irresponsible
will. So during this Confederate war of ours we see a great people,
free by inheritance, free by tradition, and clamorously free by every
conceivable act of self assertion throughout generations of history,
suddenly and willingly surrendering to military despotism all that they
had ever dreamed of, or clamored for, or fought for of personal right
and immunity, and doing all this in the name and in behalf of liberty.
The despotism thus established at the South was more perfect and more
arbitrary than that which fell upon the North because at the South
there was practically no party in existence that antagonized the powers
that were, while at the North there was such a party that must in some
ways be reckoned with. Moreover, at the North the citizen who felt that
he could not endure the despotism had at any rate the option to flee
from it, and take up his residence in some foreign country in which he
might enjoy an actually greater personal liberty; while the Southerner
who felt himself equally oppressed and wronged was completely shut in
and compelled to submit.
In the contemplation of history these facts and conditions are curious
and curiously interesting.
These were the conditions of the war at midsummer, 1863, after Lee's
retirement from Gettysburg, and after the loss of Vicksburg, Port
Hudson and the Mississippi river by the Confederates. They were
certainly not conditions suggesting an abandonment of the struggle by
either of the contestants, or at all clearly foreshadowing its end
in victory for either. Anything in the way of results still remained
possible. To hopeful minds on either side everything of good seemed
likely to happen.
So the war went on.