Never Call Retreat (17 page)

"And when the gospel of peace shall have descended again from heaven into their hearts, and the gospel of abolition and hate been expelled, let your clergy and the churches meet again in Christian intercourse. North and South."

Three things, said Vallandigham, he hated with equal fervor—abolition, forced reunion, and the idea of Southern independence. The crisis of the war, he felt, was at hand; if peace came now all would be well, but if it did not "I see nothing before us but universal political and social revolution, anarchy and bloodshed, compared with which the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution was a merciful visitation."
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Read in the light of General Lee's letter (which also looked forward to the election of a different President in 1864) this is less persuasive than the orator intended it to be. The Southern Confederacy had been fought for so hard and believed in so much that its creators would not now abandon it unless they were forced to, and they were hard men to convince. By 1863 it was folly to suppose that the old Union would quietly restore itself as soon as men stopped killing one another. The only possible way now to have a peace acceptable to the South was to draw a boundary and make a treaty between two independent nations; this speech ignored that point and addressed itself to men who took the impossible for granted.

Vallandigham in short was speaking for those numerous war-weary Northerners who were already becoming known as Copperheads. His speech did not need to be logical; it was an attempt to stir the emotions rather than the reason. It came from, and it reached out to, something massive and enduring in the heart of the North—a poignant longing for the good old days when life was simpler, a longing made all the more terrible by the fact it was hard to say where the old simplicities had gone. Vallandigham was speaking for people who were often accused of treasonous intent, as he himself was accused. Whatever his inner motives may have been, the people who looked to him for leadership desired no victory for the South and no defeat for the North they simply wanted something that had been shattered put back together again. Not only were they conservatives, resentful of the changes war was bringing; they were also lovers of liberty, dismayed by what the war seemed to be doing to freedom.

They were not, of course, the only lovers of liberty. Their bitterest political opponents loved it as much as they did. The trouble was that freedom had so many facets. Under the twisting pressure of war the administration was going in opposite directions at the same time. It had issued a notable proclamation, promising freedom to people who had never had it; almost in the same breath it had proclaimed suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, curtailing freedom for people who had always had it. In some strange way these two acts went together, inseparable as liberty and union in the old oration, as if the freedom that had always been enjoyed was a hardy growth that could survive temporary infringement whereas the other freedom was so new that it had to take precedence. What bothered so many of Vallandigham's followers was the belief that neither proclamation was really needed in the first place, and that the American people had stumbled into a bog.

It was certainly true that the effort to win the war was curtailing personal liberties. Newspapers were being suppressed on the mere say-so of army officers, and thousands of Americans had been put in prison solely because some official thought that they ought to be there. One did not need to be a friend of the Confederacy to feel that arbitrary arrests were wrong and that the policy that countenanced them was dangerous. The suppressed newspapers eventually resumed publication and the people imprisoned eventually got out, but the government undeniably was using a power American governments were not supposed to have.
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It was almost impossible for anyone to say where ordinary political opposition to the party in power ended and opposition to the Union cause began. The government was drafting men into the army. The decision to draft was both an act of politics and an act of war. As an act of politics it could be attacked; but how could an editor, a politician, a judge, or a private citizen oppose the draft without at the same time helping the Confederacy? The privilege of the writ was suspended in order to help the draft; was this suspension a proper step toward winning the war or a despotic attempt to silence criticism? It might be either, or indeed it might be both, but it made the way of the political opposition uncommonly difficult.

This was where Vallandigham stepped into a fatal trap. He made a party of moderates look dangerously immoderate, and he turned the war rather than the conduct of the war into an issue. He enabled Republicans to answer all complaints with the simple word "Copperhead!" Because he said what he said, supporters of the administration could—and infallibly would, because they also were immoderate men— charge that opponents of Abraham Lincoln were really friends of Jefferson Davis. They would ring all the changes on the argument that the Democrats were nothing more than an anti-war party.

So the ground on which Northern Democrats stood began to get dangerously narrow. There were Democrats who saw this and protested vigorously. One was another Democratic Congressman from Ohio, Samuel Sullivan Cox of Cincinnati, picturesquely known as Sunset Cox because he liked to describe the beauties of the sunsets along the Ohio River. Cox wrote to Democratic Editor Manton Marble of the New York
World
to say that although "there is a large element in our party West for peace" no one should get a wrong idea about it. Western Democrats, said Cox, did not want peace at any price; they stood with the border state Unionists, and they wanted peace only "whenever honorable and possible—not an armistice, not a hollow truce, not any cessation of hostilities which will jeopardize Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri." They wanted peace with victory, and they would not be handed over to Secessionists: "If we are beaten it will be because of this erratic course."
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It went beyond a question of immediate political advantage. Abraham Lincoln was a moderate man bringing in immoderate change; that is, he had ordained emancipation, with ultimate results which both Attorney General Bates and the middle western Democrats saw clearly, but he had his own grave doubts about what those results were going to be. If there was one man in the United States to whom the Northern Democrats could have talked frankly about the need to keep it all within bounds it was the President of the United States. He had argued for gradual emancipation and for an impossible scheme of colonization, simply because as a conservative middle westerner he doubted that the two races could get along together once the bars were down. Yet he himself was taking the bars down, striking at slavery with a rail-splitter's ax, wedge, and mallet because he believed that the Union could not otherwise be saved. The conservatives who were so concerned with the ultimate problem of reconstruction—although this fateful word had not yet passed into common currency—were cutting off their access to him, and now the only people who supported his war program seemed to be the Republican radicals. The very men who most deeply shared his brooding skepticism were being driven, by the fear of change, into a position where they could not exercise a moderating influence.

Sunset Cox was not the only man who detected the profound tactical error that was being committed. Back in December, at the time of the cabinet crisis, Tipster Barnett tried to tell S. L. M. Barlow that the conservatives must not "permit the President's ear to be opened exclusively to a majority of the present Congress." The radical tide, said Barnett, was in full flood, and if the conservatives failed to present a program the President would listen to, he would soon find that the radicals were his only supporters. Barnett was a man of no especial importance but he was in a good position to know how Mr. Lincoln's mind was working and how the war was going, and as winter wore away to spring he tried harder and harder (and with no success whatever) to persuade Democratic leaders that their strategy was "quite as mad as that of those whom they stigmatize." The power of the Rebellion was visibly waning, he argued; the Confederacy had "deathless spirit" but it was in a desperate state, and "even awkward and bumbling licks will soon bring it down." Instead of looking ahead to the opportunities that would be open then the Democrats were confining themselves to untempered criticism.

Who was to blame (Barnett asked) for the fact that the radical Republicans seemed to be controlling the President's actions? What had the conservatives ever done to give him better counsel? "One or two lazy adventures of this sort was attempted, and not by men of great vim—and then an opposition was organized to his administration
per se.
And so he has been left to the mercy of men against whom were all his pre-dispositions; and events have drifted him into the whirling vortex of their fanaticism." The conservatives had won notable victories at the polls in the autumn of 1862, but their triumph had been mismanaged even worse than the Army of the Potomac itself; they had altogether ignored the fact that "Mr. Lincoln, if he believes the men to be true to the country, is quite as glad to listen to conservatives as to anybody."
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Barnett had part of the picture but not all of it. The President was by no means following the advice of the radicals in these days, and he had not given up the attempt to get some of the conservative counsel Barnett was talking about. Late in March he sent an anxious letter to Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, one of the Democrats who had come into high office through the fall elections. Seymour was no Vallandigham. He was of course a partisan politician, as every governor had to be, an able and consistent opponent of the politician who occupied the White House, but he was a loyal Unionist not tainted with open or secret leanings toward the Confederate cause; and Mr. Lincoln's letter, most carefully phrased, was an attempt to find some sort of meeting ground.

"You and I are substantially strangers," wrote the President, "and I write this chiefly that we may become better acquainted. I, for the time being, am at the head of a nation which is in great peril; and you are at the head of the greatest State of that nation. As to maintaining the nation's life, and integrity, I assume and believe that there cannot be a difference of
purpose
between you and me. If we should differ as to the
means,
it is important that such difference should be as small as possible—that it should not be enhanced by unjust suspicions on one side or the other. In the performance of my duty, the co-operation of your State, as that of others, is needed-—in fact, is indispensable. This alone is a sufficient reason why I should wish to be at a good understanding with you. Please write me at least as long a letter as this—of course, saying in it just what you think fit."

Governor Seymour's reply was phrased with equal care: "I assure you that no political resentments, or no personal objects will turn me aside from the pathway I have marked out for myself—I intend to show to those charged with the administration of public affairs a due deference and respect and to yield them a just and generous support in all measures they may adopt within the scope of their constitutional powers. For the preservation of this Union I am ready to make every sacrifice."
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Perhaps the two men were a little too careful. President and governor had been courteous and restrained, but if there was to be a useful bridge between the administration and the conservatives it was not going to be built here. Yet it was important to build it somewhere, and Mr. Lincoln kept on trying. Now he reached out to one of the most turbulent areas of all, border state Missouri, to see how the moderate approach would go there.

Missouri badly needed a moderate approach and seemed most unlikely to get it. The state's Unionists, who had a comfortable majority when united, had fallen into what the President described as "a pestilent factional quarrel," disagreeing bitterly over the degree to which emancipation should be adopted and the restraints that should be enforced upon citizens who still felt sympathy for the South. Governor Hamilton R. Gamble, who had been put in office in the summer of 1861 after the late Nathaniel Lyon wrenched control of the state government away from the secessionists, was trying to put through a law for gradual emancipation, and he believed in mild treatment for dissenters. To the Republican radicals this was no better than appeasement, and they had rallied behind the military commander of the Department of Missouri, the elderly and conscientious Major General Samuel R. Curtis, who had won the notable victory at Pea Ridge a year earlier and who believed in stern measures for patriots of doubtful loyalty. The President had tried without success to settle this quarrel, and at last—remarking that "as I could not remove Gov. Gamble I had to remove Gen. Curtis"— he relieved Curtis of his command.

First choice to succeed Curtis was General Sumner, who was going to be displaced anyway by Hooker's abolition of the Grand Divisions. Sumner was simplicity itself, with a passion for doing exactly what his superiors told him to do; perhaps, in Missouri, such a man could be used. Attorney General Bates, who kept a watchful eye on affairs in his home state, approved of the choice. But Sumner never got there. He was worn out physically and emotionally, and on his way west he fell ill of pneumonia and died—rousing himself, characteristically, on his deathbed to take a glass of wine and ceremoniously drink a toast to the United States of America. Now it was necessary to find another man, and Mr. Bates was gloomy. "Good men do tell me," he wrote to a friend, "that patience and passive valor are great virtues, and I partly believe it and try to cultivate them. But I fear that my supply of these good articles is ebbing pretty low." After long consideration, the President sent Major General John M. Schofield out to take Curtis' place.

Schofield was young, vigorous, a West Pointer who had served with Lyon at Wilson's Creek (he would eventually get a Medal of Honor for his work there) and he had been fighting most recently along the Missouri-Arkansas border. Mr. Lincoln gave him sage but brief counsel along with his letter of appointment: Schofield was to use his own judgment, keep the peace and repel invaders without harassing or persecuting people, and keep out of the factional row if he could. "If both factions, or neither, shall abuse you," said the President, "you will probably be about right."
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