The draft had taken recruitment out of local hands and had opened the door to fraud, corruption, unfairness, and mishandling. Men could buy their way out of conscription for $300, so the draft seemed to fall disproportionately on poor and immigrant populations, and in New York Seymour alleged that Republicans had set higher enrollment quotas for Democratic districts, which was also to say for the Irish immigrants who lived there. But though Peace Democrats were not averse to fomenting racism—let black men fight for their own freedom, rioters viciously protested—the brutality of the draft riots in New York brought them up short.
A mob had roared through the draft headquarters at Third Avenue and 46th Street, and by Monday night, the Orphan Asylum for Colored Children on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, just above the reservoir, had been burned to the ground. There hadn’t been a policeman in sight. The office of the Tribune was set on fire, railroad tracks ripped up, telegraph wires cut, streetcars toppled, paving stones flung, and for the next four days, the city was bedlam. Still no police. “Men and ladies attacked and plundered by daylight in the streets; private houses suddenly invaded by gangs of a dozen ruffians and sacked, while the women and children run off for their lives,” wrote George Templeton Strong. You could hear fire bells clanging day and night.
Most despicable was the hounding of the black community. “They are the most peaceable, sober, and inoffensive of our poor, and the outrages they have suffered during this last week are less excusable—are founded on worse pretext and less provocation—than St. Bartholomew’s or the Jew-hunting of the Middle Ages,” Strong said. “How is one to deal with women who assemble around the lamp-post to which a Negro had been hanged and cut off certain parts of his body to keep as souvenirs?”
The rioting lasted four long days. Stores were locked tight. New Yorkers huddled indoors. The agitated Governor Seymour gave a speech outside City Hall, and when he reportedly called the rioters “my friends,” he offended almost all Republicans. He had refused to call for federal troops as a preventive measure, and the state militia hadn’t stopped these “friends” of Seymour from looting, burning, pillaging, and killing. The riot had been sparked by the draft, no question, but there had been men who wanted it to happen, who had been stoking the class and racial divisions, and George Templeton Strong went so far as to think that the riot had been engineered by agents of Jefferson Davis. Mayor George Opdyke, a Republican, called on Stanton for troops. Now that Lee had retreated across the Potomac, the secretary of war was able to spare them. He dispatched them from Pennsylvania to New York. But many doubted their loyalty—would those soldiers really put down a riot of fellow citizens who were protesting an abolitionist war? David Dudley Field very much wanted the Federals to restore order—and to avenge themselves; he hoped that Beast Ben Butler would commandeer the New York traitors the way he had dispatched the women of New Orleans.
More than 100 people would be killed, more than 300 people injured or wounded. George Templeton Strong, with muted satisfaction, noted after the city quieted that “the Democratic Party is at a discount with all the people I meet.”
Governor Seymour asked Lincoln to suspend the draft, which the president would not do, although he did promise districting reform. As for the constitutionality of the conscription law, Lincoln stood by it. So too did he stand by the Emancipation Proclamation, which Peace Democrats were hoping he would also retract.
Lincoln wouldn’t do that either. Reassuring the dubious Frederick Douglass, who spoke with Lincoln in his office—a black man in the executive mansion, Douglass marveled, later recalling that “I at once felt myself in the presence of an honest man”—Lincoln subsequently inquired of Grant what he thought about arming black troops. Grant replied swiftly and to the point: “I have given the subject of arming the negro my hearty support. This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.” Lincoln had what he needed for the public letter he was writing to his friend in Springfield, Illinois, James C. Conkling, to address Copperheads, conservative Republicans, and the Peace Democrats who looked forward to a reversal of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Conkling had invited Lincoln to speak at a mass Republican rally in September organized partly to counteract the peace meeting of the previous June in Springfield, when 40,000 people had protested Lincoln and the war. Though Lincoln had to decline Conkling’s invitation, he delicately composed a response, to be read aloud. For he understood that behind all the criticism lay a fundamental distrust not of the war itself but of the war’s aim insofar as that aim involved—indeed, depended on—emancipation of the slaves. “To be plain,” he confronted the skeptics head-on, “you are dissatisfied with me about the negro.” Wielding the balanced oppositions that came easily to him—though he reputedly worked hard on his speeches—Lincoln pitted himself against his critics, neutralizing them with logic, countering distrust with homespun homily, and concluding with an incantatory flourish, part apocalyptic and part conciliatory. He emphatically committed himself to the continuance of the war and its objectives, which was to say, at this point, not just the end of the rebellion but the end of slavery. He distilled his argument to its essence: “You dislike the emancipation proclamation; and, perhaps, would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional—I think differently. I think the Constitution invests its commander-in-chief, with the law of war, in time of war.” That was the matter firmly put. As for its retraction, he concluded, “it can not be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought to life.”
Nor could a man or woman, once free, return to slavery. He did not, he said, “believe any compromise, embracing the maintenance of the Union, is now possible.” There was no turning back, and, as he even more plainly stated, “you say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you.”
The use of black troops, as he further explained (quoting Grant), “constitute[s] the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.” And so he made explicit what had been implicit, for those who chose to hear him. Emancipation was a military strategy, and the black man, if he were to be effective as a soldier, needed to fight for something. “I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do as soldiers leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do, in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you?” he reasoned. “But negroes, like other people act upon motives,” he added. “—Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”
The promise being made, must be kept.
And with promises kept, peace might come; “Peace does not appear so distant as it did,” the president concluded.
“I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”
His was an incantatory, inspiring admonition from one who hoped—who imagined—he could see an end to all the bloodshed.
THE IMPLAUSIBLE SHOCK of it—countless graves lined up one after another—must have been dizzying to the thousands of people who went to Gettysburg in November to gather at the new national cemetery.
Andrew Curtin, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania, had been raising money for a national cemetery, some seventeen acres on Cemetery Hill. Soon the corpses left half buried or decomposing in the sun and even those that had been hastily covered with soil were exhumed and reburied, thanks to the combined efforts of a local lawyer, the governor, and Gettysburg ci
vic leaders. Designed by the landscape architect William Saunders, who had designed the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the National Cemetery at Gettysburg stretched wide, almost as far as the eye could see. Its consecration ceremony would feature, as the main speaker, Edward Everett, a gifted Harvard scholar and former secretary of state who, as a Constitutional Unionist, had run against Lincoln back in 1860 on John Bell’s ticket. Many of the North’s state governors would be there, as would President Lincoln, who would make a few short remarks, as he’d been asked to do, to solace widows and orphans and to assure them that the dead would not be forgotten.
On his tall black hat, Lincoln still wore a mourning band. It was for his young son Willie, who had died of a fever the year before. As the president sat on the raised platform, the mourning band was indistinguishable. When he rose to speak, he placed his reading glasses on his nose. Everett hadn’t needed them. He had orated for almost two hours without spectacles or notes. But Lincoln held his speech in his hand. It was only nine sentences long.
The sky was clear, the trees empty of leaves, the marshals on their horses trotted slowly around the thick crowd.
The next day, Lincoln’s speech was printed in the Republican newspapers. Some Democratic papers trimmed it. Copperheads complained. In the long run that hardly mattered. Schoolchildren in the next century and the one after would be made to memorize it.
Somber and gangly, President Abraham Lincoln had come to consecrate the ground, which he did, by commemorating those who had lost their lives there. He had come to mourn and to console and to remember those who gave the last full measure of devotion. He had come to convert a war of the states, among the states, into a mission, national and purposeful. And thus he resolved, as he said, “that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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FAIRLY WON
Salmon Portland Chase didn’t much like his name. He said it sounded fishy, and that was all the more irksome because he knew he was reputed to be a political opportunist. Yet he looked like a solid statesman, which he very much prided himself on being. Six feet tall, he towered over many of his opponents, he was buttoned-up and staid, and if he lacked the oratorical charisma of a Wendell Phillips, he was no less an abolitionist. He had joined the Liberty Party in 1841, and four years later, when handed a sterling silver pitcher in honor of his support of fugitive slaves and free blacks, he firmly declared, “True Democracy makes no enquiry about the color of the skin, or the place of nativity.”
One of the four senators, along with Charles Sumner, who had voted against the Fugitive Slave Act, Chase later helped found the Republican Party, for he had long studied the work of William Wilberforce (“How his example shames & humbles me”), and, like Wilberforce, he frequently drew a hard moral line. That was true even in church, where Chase refused to take the communion cup if he felt unworthy, which was often. He had been trained to be righteous, even self-righteous, by his uncle, the Episcopal bishop of Worthington in the new state of Ohio, and by the Congregationalism of Dartmouth College. He had a penchant for absolutes. His abolitionism too sprang from religious evangelism mixed with arrogant humility. Slavery was a moral evil, and Chase was a moral man, right down to his personal habits: he did not drink or smoke or for that matter read much fiction.
Chase was a disappointment to many, including himself, and he was understandably unhappy. (By the time Lincoln had appointed Chase as Treasury secretary, he had buried three wives and two children.) Cold, lonely, and humorless, he was also so nearsighted that he frequently failed to recognize friends on the street who, being sensitive, assumed they had been slighted, perhaps rightly in some cases. True, Chase might be a “man of mark,” said Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, but he possessed an “inordinate ambition, intense selfishness for official distinction and power to do for the country, and considerable vanity. These traits impair his moral courage; they make him a sycophant with the truly great, and sometimes arrogant towards the humble.”
The ambitious appetite of Salmon Portland Chase had been partly sated: before he entered Lincoln’s cabinet, he’d been senator, governor, and presidential contender from Ohio, and after Lincoln accepted Chase’s resignation in the spring of 1864, he would take the bench in 1865 as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. But Chase had wanted to be president, and it seemed that nothing but that office would satisfy him. “He constantly indulged in hope and delusions that always proved deceptive,” recalled Carl Schurz. “It was a pathetic spectacle.” Chase’s friend Senator Ben Wade put the matter more succinctly: “Chase is a good man, but his theology is unsound. He thinks there is a fourth person in the Trinity.”
Lincoln knew that Chase, unlike the other members of his cabinet (William Seward, for instance), still harbored “fond dreams” of the presidency. And so Chase was a potential threat. He was the darling of the more radical wing of the Republican Party, and certain key War Democrats admired him. Even Noah Brooks, a journalist partial to Lincoln, publicly praised the secretary. “Chase keeps ahead of public sentiment,” Brooks concluded, “Lincoln prefers to be led by it.”
Maybe so; or perhaps Lincoln just wanted the press to believe he was directed by events, which, given the vagaries of the battlefields, was a reasonable position in wartime. It was also a useful hedge: belittling your power left you free to be subtle, to be more imaginative, and to manage people, if not events, more shrewdly. Lincoln supervised public sentiment far more delicately than his opponents did, and he outmaneuvered Chase, who had his own eager, conflicted self to deal with.
In the fall of 1863, just when Union fortunes seemed to be improving, given Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the fair-haired, well-liked General William S. Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland were roundly defeated at Chickamauga, south of Chattanooga, Tennessee: 16,000 Union casualties, 18,000 Confederates. Earlier, Rosecrans had tangled with the choleric Confederate general Braxton Bragg at Murfreesboro, which was another celebrated Union victory but another slaughter during which Rosecrans’s closest friend had been decapitated before his eyes; by early September Rosecrans had seized eastern Tennessee and Chattanooga, a railroad center which he boasted he’d taken without spilling a drop of blood. But General Longstreet had come to reinforce Bragg with two of his battle-proven divisions, and near Chickamauga Creek (Chickamauga being a Cherokee word meaning “river of death”), Bragg pummeled Rosecrans while Longstreet efficiently exploited an inadvertent gap in the Federal line. The soldiers retreated, as did Rosecrans, leaving General George H. Thomas (soon dubbed the “Rock of Chickamauga”) and his one brave corps to fight the onslaught of grim graycoats and provide cover until dusk.
Yet the Confederate victory was not exploited; this time a Southern general failed to pursue. Confounded by the huge numbers of dead and dying (including ten generals), the unpredictable Bragg refused to heed the urgings of Longstreet and those of the cavalry lieutenant general Nathan Bedford Forrest, both of whom wanted to fight to the finish and destroy the Army of the Cumberland the very next morning, once and for all. They did not, and Rosecrans was able to make it back to Chattanooga. Stanton’s spy Charles Dana, who had been with Rosecrans, was calling the general a dolt—likely, Dana was influenced by Grant, who had never liked Old Rosy—and newspapers were reporting that the Rosecrans who had recently been hailed as a peerless strategist was actually an opium eater and religious maniac (Rosecrans was a Roman Catholic). What else could account for his being addled during such an important battle? Even the president said that Old Rosy was behaving “like a duck hit on the head.”
Secretary of War Stanton, like the implacable man with a mission that he was, furiously organized the various railroad lines to make sure that Hooker and an expeditionary force could get to Chattanooga as quickly as possible—a record eleven days, as it happened—to reinforce Rosecrans, whose men had li
ttle food and scant ammunition. Lincoln, meanwhile, placed Grant in command of a newly created Division of the Mississippi (which included the Army of the Cumberland, the Army of the Ohio, and the Army of Kentucky), and at Grant’s request he replaced Rosecrans with George Thomas.
On October 23, Grant rode into Chattanooga, and in November he was joined by his redheaded, testy friend William Tecumseh Sherman, who arrived with the Army of the Tennessee. Their combined forces—Grant, Hooker, Sherman, and Thomas—turned on Bragg. In the so-called Battle of the Clouds, Hooker attacked the Confederates on Lookout Mountain, and Sherman attacked Bragg’s other side, less successfully than Hooker did. Grant sent Thomas to Missionary Ridge, whose steep incline he and his men spectacularly climbed, placing their flags at last on the ridge. Bragg and the Confederates fled. The Confederate lines of communication between the East and the Mississippi Valley had been broken. Bragg asked to be relieved of command. The mood in the North again brightened.
Replacing Rosecrans with George Thomas had made good military sense, but Rosecrans was a popular general—from Ohio, no less, Salmon Chase’s home state. John Hay, Lincoln’s young secretary, warned the president that Chase would doubtless “make capital” out of Rosecrans’s demotion. Lincoln seemed unconcerned. “I suppose he will,” he retorted, “like the bluebottle fly, lay his eggs in every rotten spot he can find.” Still, since Clement Vallandigham, cracking his Copperhead whip from Canada, was running for governor of Ohio, Lincoln decided not to announce Rosecrans’s replacement until after the election.
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