Whinnying in terror, horses reared up at the sound of the shells. For months, the residents of Vicksburg had listened with dread to the slow, steady pounding of the city or watched in helpless disbelief as the night sky turned bright red, reflecting the flames. Noncombatants had been ordered to leave as early as March, but many stayed, taking refuge in small caves dug out of the hills near their homes. “Caves were the fashion—the rage—over besieged Vicksburg,” wrote a woman survivor with a dash of mordant humor. Praying that they would not be buried alive, they listened to the report of guns and the loud rumble of the plummeting shells, and if they ventured out, they watched in awe “the burning matter and balls [that] fell like large, clear blue-and-amber stars, scattering hither and thither.”
The garrison did not have sufficient provisions, and for a while families lived on corn bread and bacon. “We are utterly cut off from the world,” said another woman, “surrounded by a circle of fire.” That was at the end of May. In June the local newspaper was printed on wallpaper, and dogs and cats mysteriously disappeared, likely eaten by hungry civilians and soldiers. In July, the Federals entered the town. The siege was over; there was nothing more that Pemberton could do. General Johnston had never arrived with reinforcements. Instead, the Union men strode into the city with their “sleek horses, polished arms, bright plumes,—this was the pride and panoply of war,” said a Vicksburg survivor. “The heart turned with throbs of added pity to the worn men in gray, who were being blindly dashed against this embodiment of modern power.”
True, Grant had more men than Pemberton. True, Jefferson Davis had had no troops to send to Pemberton. But the Confederates were also divided against themselves. They had been defeated not by “modern power” as much as the difference of opinion between Pemberton, who wanted to defend Vicksburg, and Johnston, who preferred to defend the army now and recapture Vicksburg after destroying Grant. And there was Grant himself: implacable and relentless, the man who hated bloodshed so much that he could not stomach rare meat but who, after the heavy losses at Shiloh, was called a butcher.
In Washington, Halleck was mighty pleased by the news of Grant’s victory. “In boldness of plan, rapidity of execution, and brilliancy of results,” Halleck told Grant, “these operations will compare most favorably with those of Napoleon at Ulm.” Lincoln too was relieved, at last. “I can’t spare this man,” he reportedly said. “He fights.”
ABOVE VICKSBURG, AT a Federal post at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, a Confederate brigade had attacked four regiments of black troops, including the 9th Louisiana Volunteers of African Descent and the 1st Mississippi Infantry, in June. The fighting was fierce especially since the black troops, armed with muskets that didn’t work, had to take to hand-to-hand combat, using their guns as clubs. Yet their success, despite their heavy losses, helped dampen doubts about the black soldiers’ ability on the battlefield. So too had the bravery of the black troops fighting under General Nathaniel P. Banks at Port Hudson, Louisiana, changed many minds—particularly that of Banks himself, who was no abolitionist. “I posted the First and Third Regiments of negro troops. The First Regiment of Louisiana Engineers, composed exclusively of colored men, excepting the officers, was also engaged in the operations of the day,” Banks reported to Halleck. “The position occupied by these troops was one of importance, and called for the utmost steadiness and bravery in those to whom it was confided. It gives me pleasure to report that they answered every expectation. In many respects their conduct was heroic,” Banks continued. “Whatever doubt may have existed heretofore as to the efficiency of organizations of this character, the history of this day proves conclusively to those who were in condition to observe the conduct of these regiments that the Government will find in this class of troops effective supporters and defenders.”
Charles Dana was ecstatic. A member of the experimental commune Brook Farm in his early days, he’d been managing editor of the New-York Tribune and the man who had convinced Greeley to run the “On to Richmond” slogan. Stanton had hired him as assistant secretary of war, but in reality his job was to spy on Grant and report on the general’s alleged drinking problem. From Milliken’s Bend, he wrote with exultation that the battle there had “completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops. I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of the negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it.”
That was only part of the story. A great number of soldiers, including officers, and citizens did not care what happened to the black soldier or, for that matter, to the slave. Those people supported and fought for the Union, and only the Union. To them, emancipation muddied or in fact subverted war aims. “The war is not waged by abolitionists, is not the result of abolitionism,” Edmund Stedman had reassured his mother after the First Battle of Bull Run. “We are not fighting the negro’s cause.” Though Stedman later changed his mind, he was as hostile to abolitionists as were other Union supporters and soldiers. Hearing that Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th had been defeated at Fort Wagner that summer, Shaw’s friend Major Henry Livermore Abbott remarked that Shaw “was too good a fellow to be sacrificed for an experiment, & an experiment that has demonstrated niggers won’t fight as they ought.” The black soldiers had indeed fought, and fought valiantly, but Major Abbott, among others, refused to believe it.
In the South, hatred of the Yankees competed for animosity against black soldiers; it was a tough call. That was true on the border, too. “We are for the Union, not for the Yankees,” said one family member in the newly formed state of West Virginia. “Shall we sink down as serfs to the heartless, speculative Yankee for all time to come,” asked a writer in The Crisis of Columbus, Ohio, “—swindled by his tariffs, robbed by his taxes, skinned by his railroad monopolies?” Doubtless anti-Yankee sentiment and racism—as well as resentment of the Lincoln administration and hostility to abolitionists—spurred men such as Ohio representative Clement Laird Vallandigham and his harebrained plan to unite the western states with Southern ones against New England. “[Horatio] Seymour, the New York World, Jeff. Davis, and [Samuel] Cox and Vallandigham, have taken advantage of the crisis to make a joint attack on New England, with a view to detach the West from the loyal cause and join her to the Gulf States, and leave New England in the cold,” declared Edmund Stedman. “I think, to be sure,” he added, “that our abolitionists are making idiots of themselves, . . . but the Northern copperheads . . . are our worst foes.”
Copperheads: the name for those sympathizers with the South came not just from the snake but from the copper penny, with its picture of Liberty, that some of them wore as lapel pins. Clement Vallandigham was one of them. A silver-tongued man of many words, as early as 1855 he advised his fellow Democrats to tackle head-on the issue of slavery in the anti-abolition and antislavery terms of the day: “PATRIOTISM ABOVE MOCK PHILANTHROPY; THE CONSTITUTION ABOVE ANY MISCALLED HIGHER LAW OF MORALS OR RELIGION; AND THE UNION OF MORE VALUE THAN MANY NEGROES.” The self-confident, oracular son of a Presbyterian minister, Vallandigham liked to preach politics, and a player in the Democratic Party, he’d been elected to the Ohio state legislature when he was only twenty-five. In Congress in 1858, he was repeatedly branded a secessionist and dug in his heels. He would not be stopped. With that telltale copper penny in his lapel, he called himself a westerner, not a Northerner, and announced he had very little sympathy with the North.
Any and all opposition provided Vallandigham with the publicity he liked, and after Fort Sumter he immediately accused Lincoln of “executive usurpation.” “Every principal act of the Administration since has been a glaring usurpation of power, and a palpable and dangerous violation of that very Constitution which this civil war is professedly waged to support,” Vallandigham spoke out in the House, accusing the government of despotism and tyranny. Newspaper editors had been seized and arrested in the dead of night, civil liberties had been trampled, and the poor Unio
n soldier marched barefooted, bareheaded, and famished while “contrabands” and fugitive slaves filled their stomachs. Though he wanted to squelch the rebellion, to him there were actually two rebellions afoot, “the Secession Rebellion South and the Abolition Rebellion North and West. I am against both; for putting down both.”
After losing his congressional seat by 600 votes in the fall of 1862—thanks to Republican gerrymandering—Vallandigham crusaded more brazenly than ever against continuing the war. As he explained before he left the House chamber for the last time, he had never supported the war and had consistently voted against appropriations—except of course when the “separate interests” of the soldier were involved. He respected the young man who had enlisted, and he praised anyone, unlike himself, who was committed to the war effort. But he would not join it. He could not. He deplored its death tolls, its barbarism, its basic violation of protected freedoms and the civil rights of white men. He loathed the nationalization of such institutions as banks—the National Banking Act (to organize a nationally chartered bank, create a federal banking system, and to issue notes to finance the war) became law in early 1863—and the monopolistic enterprise of the railroads. Above all, he utterly loathed what he called the Republicans’ “enslavement of the white race, by debt and taxes and arbitrary power.”
“Ought this war to continue?” he asked and answered his own question. “No—not a day, not an hour.”
If Vallandigham had pacifistic points to make, his racism consistently undermined his position—his racism and his regionalism, which for him had become the same thing. Proposing “reunion,” that is, union as it had been (his campaign slogan had been “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it is”), he wanted to turn back the clock, as if there had been no war, no Emancipation Proclamation, no black soldiers dying on the front, nothing. He was not an appeaser; he was a fantasist. As for slavery, he continued, that was not the cause of the war; abolition was, and it remained the culprit—ugly, creeping abolition. Reviving the old saw about how slavery could never take hold in the West anyway, he dismissed out of hand the territorial issues that had rattled the nation before and, tragically, after 1848. At stake were simply two systems of labor, slave and free, which had always existed compatibly in the South. Declare free trade between North and South. And remember: in the North, or in the West, free men should enjoy free soil, which is to say no competition from an influx of free blacks. As for the South, he continued, the Constitution protects slavery there and can do so again. Let slavery persist—in other words, protected where it is: keep the Union as it is now.
On January 14, 1863, Vallandigham spoke without notes to a packed House, and while Republicans were wont to label his long speech as brilliant treason, grinning Democrats rallied round him and shook his hand. Vallandigham soared to the top of the Peace Democrat ladder; newspaper editors in the Middle West joined the movement. The Cincinnati Enquirer claimed, “The real genuine Democracy of the country were never at heart for the war.”
On May 1 Vallandigham opened his gubernatorial campaign in Mount Vernon, Ohio, speaking amid floats and flags about the unnecessary, wicked, and cruel war. It was a political ploy, this speech, not just because of what he said but because he was taunting the irritable, impetuous General Burnside, who was waiting nearby, ready to pounce. Assigned—demoted—to the Department of the Ohio, the truculent general precipitously issued a general military order (No. 38) that outlawed so-called seditious speech, which was to say such declarations as Vallandigham’s about the war. And now there was this: Vallandigham, orating among the floats and flags, wondering aloud what purpose the dead of Fredericksburg had served. He was baiting Burnside.
At three o’clock in the morning on May 5, Burnside’s soldiers broke down the door of Vallandigham’s home in Dayton, Ohio, and arrested Vallandigham in his bedroom on the charge of publicly expressing “his sympathies for those in arms against the Government of the United States, 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.” Dragged before a kangaroo military tribunal that found him guilty, Vallandigham was sentenced to imprisonment for the duration of the war, which of course was a boost to his gubernatorial campaign. “I am a Democrat—for Constitution, for Law, for the Union, for Liberty—this is my only ‘crime,’ ” he cried from jail, addressing himself to the “Democracy of Ohio.” He was a happy martyr.
The arrest sparked a political firestorm. When Vallandigham applied for a writ of habeas corpus, the request was denied, and the issue—a serious constitutional one—fell right into Lincoln’s lap. Though the arrest had occurred without the president’s knowledge, Lincoln had to act quickly. Not wishing to undermine an order issued by one of his generals, he commuted Vallandigham’s sentence to banishment. Regarded as an enemy of the state, the handsome, eloquent, ambitious Democrat was escorted to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where he was met by General William Rosecrans and subsequently turned over to Confederate authorities. As an exile, he was remade, or so some hoped, into a “Man without a Country,” which is what Edward Hale called him in the didactic and very popular story of that name, written that summer and based on the Vallandigham case. To throw away one’s country was not just treason; it left one isolated, homeless, silent, adrift.
Lincoln appears in the backdrop of “Man without a Country” as the common man who rose to the country’s highest office. Soon this common man, the president, dispatched two public letters, one to the New York Democrats and one to the Ohio Democrats, to explain his recent course of action in legalistic, rational, and comprehensive terms. Patiently noting that the Constitution allowed the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in cases of rebellion, and declaring that “ours is a case of rebellion,” he pointed out that public safety required such actions as the one he took. And in what was swiftly becoming Lincolnesque fashion—balancing unbalanced antithesis, posing abstract questions in plainspoken terms—the president prudently wondered whether he must “shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?”
Wily agitators: they were legion, or so it seemed, if one were to judge by such secret societies as the Knights of the Golden Circle, founded in the Midwest by members who swore secret oaths and recognized the special handshake or uttered secret codes. First organized in 1854, the Knights, their filibustering eye on Mexico, hoped to turn the Gulf (the Golden Circle) into one big slave plantation. By 1860 the secret organization was overtly secessionist, and after the outbreak of war, the Knights were presumably aiding and abetting the Confederates, perhaps by burning bridges or perhaps by intimidating blacks and Northern sympathizers. No one knew for sure; maybe Northerners were imagining things, though probably not. Doubtless the system of hand signals and passwords (for instance, Calhoun spelled backward), divulged under penalty of death, dismayed as many people as it titillated, which kept the rumor circulating: that Vallandigham was a grand commander of the Knights or some related society and in the summer or fall of 1863, the secret members, armed with revolvers, would welcome back Vallandigham, who would then foment a rebellion of free states. As it was, the Confederates had helped him flee to Canada, where he pursued, in absentia, the Ohio governorship.
Rumors of a conspiracy to overthrow the government reached Washington through Rosecrans in Missouri. The reports were too incendiary, thought Rosecrans, to be committed to paper, so Lincoln instructed John Hay to go to Missouri and talk directly to the general. Hay learned from the hearty, sociable blond Rosecrans that a group called the Order of American Knights, headed by Vallandigham in the North, planned to join guerrillas and rebels in the border states and harass, plunder, and even murder Unionists. It would be a campaign of terror to make sure Lincoln would not be reelected. To verify his claim, Rosecrans had discovered secret documents but wouldn’t entrust them to Hay. Lincoln pooh-poohed the whole thing. The secret seemed out, and as far
as he was concerned neither the Knights of the Golden Circle nor this group were “worth regarding.”
The Copperhead mutiny may have been a muddled fantasy or a very real and very sinister plan that failed. Whatever it was, the news in the summer of 1863 of Confederate corpses rotting on the Gettysburg battlefield and of Grant’s taking Vicksburg checked the popularity of the Peace Democrats and forced the Knights to change course. Vicksburg and Gettysburg, despite the horrific numbers of dead and dying, spelled victory at last, victory incontrovertible. Morale skyrocketed. The Mississippi was open—“the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” Lincoln wrote in purple prose—and the once indestructible Lee no longer lived a charmed life.
THERE WAS UGLY rioting in the North but not because of any Copperhead mutiny, or at least not directly. The issue was the national draft, instituted the previous March.
More soldiers were needed. “The conscription is necessary,” ran an editorial in The New York Times on Friday, July 10. “Even after the late great victories, a new army of 300,000 men must be got ready to move upon the confederacy.” That Saturday, July 11, just a week after the Federals hauled their flag over Vicksburg and Lee retreated from Gettysburg, there was a draft lottery in New York City. It began quietly, and on Sunday, the newspapers published the names of the draftees.
On Monday, July 13, the city was in flames.
Governor Horatio Seymour was a Peace Democrat from upstate who opposed conscription. Temperate and dignified, well read, smooth-faced, and soulless, at least according to George Templeton Strong, Seymour was a firm advocate of states’ rights, and, like Vallandigham, he believed that slavery had nothing to do with the war and should continue to have nothing to do with it. What had brought the nation to disaster were Southern fire-eaters and Northern abolitionists—and the present Republican administration. Seymour detested its emancipation policy; to him, emancipation was simply “a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, and of arson and murder, which would invoke the interference of civilized Europe.” For him, the national draft was yet another unconstitutional means of freeing the slaves—at the expense of the white worker.
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