President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Prompt Vindication of His Honor

  IN THE SUMMER and fall of 1863 the president would be inundated with another barrage of petitions, telegrams, and personal appeals, this time asking for mercy in the case of Dr. David M. Wright, a well-respected physician and citizen and family man of Norfolk, Virginia, who had been found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hanged.

  When back before the war in 1853 Dr. Wright and his family had moved from Edenton, North Carolina, to Norfolk, some leading citizens of Edenton had taken the trouble to send a testimonial, on blue paper, with rows of those flowery nineteenth-century signatures, commending Dr. Wright’s worthiness: “He stands professionally among the first in the eastern part of North Carolina” and “His personal character is untarnished in any respect. We commend him to the citizens of Norfolk as an able physician, a gentleman in all aspects, and as possessing social qualities that will endear him to the community to which he goes.” Unfortunately those endearing social qualities were thoroughly soaked in the presuppositions of a slaveholding, deeply racist society, and the respectable Dr. Wright was caught in a major clash of moral cultures.

  On July 11, 1863, he was standing in the doorway of Foster and Moore, a store on Norfolk’s Main Street, when a company of soldiers came marching by, two abreast, to the beating of a drum, on the sidewalk. There were several unsettling novelties in this scene for a “gentleman in all aspects” from Virginia and North Carolina.

  In the first place, that they were marching on the sidewalk was, in Dr. Wright’s opinion, a dubious novelty. Sidewalk etiquette—who steps aside for whom—was a point of no small importance in the caste society of the slave South.

  In the second place, these were Union soldiers. The Norfolk area, Portsmouth, and the Gosport Navy Yard, the nation’s prime naval base and a major shipbuilding facility, had first been seized by the Virginia secessionists in April 1861, even before Virginia technically had seceded from the Union: it was a major prize. Its capture included the taking of the Merrimack, which a year later, on March 9, 1862, refitted and renamed the Virginia by the rebels, would engage in the famous duel of ironclads with the Union’s Monitor. But then in May, as the Army of the Potomac was advancing in force up the peninsula toward Richmond, the Confederate forces under Joseph E. Johnston withdrew from Norfolk and retreated back up the peninsula. President Lincoln himself had been present, visiting Fort Monroe with Chase and Stanton, and had given orders and had himself picked out a landing spot for the Union troops; Chase had the thrill of accompanying the troops as they received the surrender of Norfolk.

  So now, a little over a year after that recovery, the area was a Union-held enclave within a Confederate state—indeed, the state in which the Confederate capital was now located and major battles of the war in the East were being fought. And there were soldiers dressed in blue uniforms marching down the streets—and sidewalks.

  One more novelty, the most important. These were “colored” soldiers: Company B, First Regiment, U.S. Colored Volunteers.

  At the start of the war in 1861, the Union armies of a deeply prejudiced nation had been all white, and black volunteers had been rejected. During 1862 the first sporadic organizing of African American units had begun, in Sea Island, in Louisiana, in Kansas, under the initiative of individual commanders in particular situations, still surrounded by doubts. One hugely significant provision of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, six months before these events in Norfolk, was the declaration that “such persons [the former slaves who are now to be forever free] will be received into the armed forces of the United States.”

  And the first six months of 1863 had seen the first systematic recruiting of free black men, freed slaves, and fugitives into new regiments in the Union army. At first, like all the other troops of the Union army, they were attached to particular states—the famous 54th Massachusetts is an example. But then in May 1863 the Lincoln administration regularized and systematized the recruiting and organizing of “colored” troops, establishing a “Bureau of Colored Troops” in Washington. The regiments into which African Americans would henceforth be organized would not be tied to any state. Black Americans would be mustered directly into the federal service uniquely under the authority of the United States, with a regimental name and number not from any one state but as part of the “U.S. Colored Troops”—as was the case with this company marching down the sidewalk of Main Street in Norfolk in July 1863.

  The past six months had seen a revolutionary change in the relationship of the Union army to black men and the mounting of systematic efforts to fill the new “colored” regiments. Northern opposition was being diminished, even overcome, particularly as reports spread of the brave performance of the Negro troops under fire first in small encounters in Florida and the West, and then in battle in places called Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend in Louisiana. And just a week after this July 11 episode in Norfolk, on July 18, the 54th Massachusetts would cover itself with glory storming the rampart of Fort Wagner.

  July 1863 was also the month of the dreadful draft riots in New York City, in which a mob, largely Irish, protesting the draft, burned a black orphanage, attacked the homes of abolitionists, and killed black men, women, and children, hanging many from lampposts—the worst riots in American history. But just eight months after that outrage, in March 1864, New Yorkers would cheer and celebrate the 20th U.S. Colored Troops as it marched through the city streets and was honored by leading citizens in a ceremony at Union Square. Attitudes toward black soldiers in the North, in the flux of war, were undergoing astonishingly rapid change.

  But the South saw quite an opposite reaction. Fear. Fury. Fierce indignation. Murderous rage. To regard a black man in the uniform of the opposing armies as a legitimate enemy struck at the very foundation of the newly founded Confederacy. Its core was not only slavery but also a “cornerstone” belief in racial inequality and racial subordination that justified slavery. In the first days of the Confederacy, when hope and candor still reigned, that “cornerstone” was quite explicitly defended—as in a famous nation-defining speech by the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander P. Stephens, in March 1861. Stephens had not only insisted on the inferiority of the Negro “race” and its necessary and perennial subordination to the superior white “race,” but he had also (this part was unusual) specifically rejected the egalitarian generalities of Jefferson and other Founders: they were wrong. The Confederacy, by contrast, was now founded on the “truth” about racial inequalities and therefore slavery.

  These were not, to be sure, merely dry points in social and political theory. They were passionately held attitudes inculcated in the citizenry of a slavery-based society. The responses of Confederate political leaders and generals to the Union army recruiting and arming black men had a passion, a touch even of fanaticism, that revealed how deeply that new development struck at their collective self-conception and their prejudices. Jefferson Davis had described the Emancipation Proclamation, and specifically its proposal to recruit and to arm black men (“human beings of an inferior race,” in Davis’s view), as an attempt to bring on “the most execrable massacre recorded in the history of guilty man.” The Confederate Congress resolved that officers of units of Negroes “if captured be put to death or otherwise punished” at the discretion of a military court. Negro soldiers themselves were to be treated in accord with the laws of the state in which they were captured, which meant they would be returned to or (for free blacks) newly placed in slavery. Some Confederate officials and army officers, in rhetoric and in practice, went further. James Seddon, the Confederate secretary of war, said as widespread Union recruiting began that his War Department had “determined that Negroes captured would not be treated as prisoners of war,” a determination that would stall prisoner exchanges almost to the end of the conflict. Seddon also said, “As to white officers serving with Negro troops, we ought never to be inconvenienced by such prisoners.”

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bsp; SO ON THIS SUMMER DAY, in this slaveholding Southern city, a company of black Union soldiers marched to the beat of a drum up the sidewalk of Main Street. This must have been the first time such a sight was seen in Norfolk. The officer in charge of this company was a young white man from Vermont named Anson L. Sanborn, only twenty-one years old, a lieutenant. (The racial mores of the whole nation did mean that almost always as yet the officers of these “colored” units were white.) Something of a crowd assembled in the Norfolk streets, taunting and jeering at this deeply disturbing sight. From the doorway of Foster and Moore Dr. Wright called out a remark that included the word “cowardly.” He would himself characterize his remark as “offensive.”

  Lieutenant Sanborn commanded his troops to halt. He sent one of his company in the direction of the provost marshal’s office and gave the command to “order arms.” Sanborn then moved around the troops toward Dr. Wright, making remarks of his own that included, apparently, the proposal that Dr. Wright was to be arrested. There was, one witness reported, “considerable excitement.” As Sanborn was turning “as if to move away,” Dr. Wright lifted a pistol he had been holding behind his back and shot Sanborn, wounding him in the hand and shoulder. As Sanborn “stooped down,” Wright almost immediately fired a second shot from his five-chambered Colt revolver. This bullet entered Sanborn’s body at the collarbone and did not come out, causing an internal wound that would shortly cause his death.

  Still alive for the moment, Sanborn “rushed in on the Doctor” and “forced him back into the store.” They tussled over the gun, with Wright holding it still from the butt and Sanborn from the barrel. Dr. Wright, arguing later that he had never meant to kill Sanborn, pointed out that if he had so intended, he could have fired again directly into Sanborn’s body at that later moment in the melee.

  Norfolk was under martial law, with other Union troops in the area, in particular a regiment of New York volunteers. Some of them too had been on Main Street and had seen these events. One witness at Dr. Wright’s trial—a Union army colonel from the 155th New York Volunteers named Hugh C. Flood—reported that the “Negroes of the company” had set up a shout that he thought was “Let’s kill him” (Wright) and charged into the store. Colonel Flood “rushed in with the foremost of them” and kept himself moving, as he put it, up to the lieutenant struggling with the doctor. Colonel Flood ordered the others back, appropriated the pistol, took the doctor by the arm, and told him he was a colonel in the U.S. service and that he, the doctor, was under arrest. Dr. Wright said, “Very well, sir, I am under arrest, and give myself up to your charge.”

  Lieutenant Sanborn, meanwhile, “slid along the counter and fell to the floor and the blood gushed out of his nose and nostrils.” Then came the odd moment when Colonel Flood sent for a doctor—and then was reminded that the perpetrator himself was a doctor. When Colonel Flood proposed to take Dr. Wright, under arrest, to the provost marshal, Dr. Wright said, “Let me do something for this man—I want to do something for this man,” meaning Sanborn, bleeding to death on the floor. In the trial Wright’s counsel did not do much cross-examining—Wright’s only real defense struck at more fundamental levels—but on this one point the counsel for the defense would ask the significance of Dr. Wright’s saying, “Let me do something for this man.” Colonel Flood answered: “I should judge that he wanted to do something to alleviate the lieutenant’s pain.” He had reverted to being a physician. And one may even read in Colonel Flood’s testimony that as Dr. Wright was being led away, he reached out his hand toward Sanborn, dying on the floor.

  ANOTHER UNION SOLDIER from the New York volunteers, testifying at the trial, when asked what he knew about the deceased, gave a memorably succinct summary of the short, happy life of Anson Sanborn: “I knew him as Lieut. Sanborn of Vermont; became acquainted with him in Portsmouth, Va., where he was recruiting colored troops. I saw him alive on the Eleventh inst. And afterwards on the same day, I saw him dead in the store of Foster and Moore, on Main Street, in this city.” I saw him alive…I saw him dead.

  Two interpretations of this episode were cast up by the warring cultures behind the warring armies. Confederate secretary of war James Seddon, no doubt reflecting the version of the story current in Richmond, said that one should have sympathetic understanding for the “natural indignation” that Wright felt at the “shameful spectacle” he was witnessing. Seddon had to mean the sight of black troops in Union army uniforms marching in formation down the streets of his Southern city—a city of which Dr. Wright was such a respectable and eminent and well-connected citizen. And what did he do out of his “natural indignation” at this “shameful spectacle”? The next phrase that Seddon used is truly wonderful, a revelation of a deep moral gulf: what Wright then did, said Seddon, was “a prompt vindication of his honor.”*51

  Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, on the other hand, in his summary of the case for President Lincoln, had rather a different phrase to describe the same event. It was, Holt said, an “unprovoked assassination.”

  The trial took place in Norfolk before one of those military commissions that were a new feature of the Civil War—a military court trying civilians in an area in which, presumably, the war had displaced the civil justice system. The fairness and legitimacy of these military commissions were an issue at the time and continued to be an issue before the Supreme Court and in historical writing—one of the issues about civil liberties in the Civil War. Wright’s counsel did raise the question of proper jurisdiction, and Dr. Wright himself would refer to it. One may surely guess that Dr. Wright’s fate would have been different had he had a civil trial with a jury of Norfolk citizens. The prosecution responded that this court “was sitting within a district congruent from rebel enemies [surrounded by seceded Virginia], held by military force, and utterly dependent upon the military power for each moment’s enjoyment of security.”

  The court—the military commission—consisted of three Union army officers appointed by the commanding general of the Department of Virginia. The charge was that David M. Wright “did willfully, feloniously, and with malice aforethought kill and murder A. L. Sanborn, 2nd Lieut., Company B, 1st Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, by shooting him to death with a pistol.”

  Wright pleaded not guilty.

  Mark E. Neely, Jr., in the leading study of civil liberties during the Civil War, indicates that despite the denunciation of these military commissions by Democrats and some Republicans at the time and by some later scholars, such trials “definitely stood a step above no law at all [or the mere will of the commander].” Despite the allegations against them, “trials by military commission were marked by procedural regularity. The best proof of this is the existence of the records themselves,” turning brown and bound in red ribbons in the National Archives. These trials were better on that score than ordinary trials below the appellate level, which had no record: “Trials by military commission were all recorded,” and in a legible hand, preserved across the decades. The accused is present, allowed to confront his accusers and to question all witnesses, and to have the advice of counsel. In fact, the commission sitting for Dr. Wright’s trial twice postponed its proceeding in order for him to retain adequate counsel. The lawyers retained were about as able and well connected as one could ask: L. H. Chandler, who had been U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and a congressman-elect (from the shadow Union state of “restored Virginia”), and Samuel J. Bowden, a U.S. senator. They were supporters of the Union, well connected enough to be able to write letters to President Lincoln, to call on him, and to make a case to him for clemency for Dr. Wright.

  If you read through the transcript of the trial, you will surely not conclude that it was arbitrary or unfair in its procedure—assuming you agree that under the circumstances a civilian might be tried by a court consisting of three army officers. Wright and his lawyers were given every courtesy and safeguard. Dr. Wright himself (and his wife, as one learns from a letter she wrote at a later point) wanted to emphasize
that in fact he had no malice toward Sanborn and no premeditation of the act. “With malice aforethought?” They said no. Wright would insist that he had never known Sanborn before their encounter, and he described the event this way in his remarks to the court: “Suppose that two strangers meet at the corner of the street, bump heads, get into a difficulty and one of them is killed. This would be a parallel case.” (But it would not be a parallel case. The “difficulty,” needless to say, was not just a reciprocal head bumping.) So he had never met or heard of Sanborn until that fateful moment on a July afternoon. Premeditation? We may note, arguing a little across the years with the Wrights outside the record of the trial, that in her letter his wife says that her husband was asleep when the company marched past their house (on their way downtown) and that one of his grown daughters awakened him saying, “Look!” and that they looked out the window at the black men in Union army uniforms marching by. Better that he had stayed asleep! Mrs. Wright does not go on with the story, but what happened is plain enough. The good doctor, in some excitement, we may infer, headed quickly for Main Street, taking with him—fateful decision!—his loaded five-chambered Colt revolver.

  Chandler and Bowden did not try to defend their client with respect to any of these features of the incident. Except for the one question about the doctor saying he wanted to do something for “this man” (Sanborn), eliciting the sympathetic response that the statement was not threatening but a doctor’s desire to help, the lawyers declined to cross-examine Colonel Flood or the other witnesses. They had a different defense in mind. They would challenge the jurisdiction of the military commission; failing that, they would plead that Wright was temporarily insane.