The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  Some Copperhead journals called for violent resistance to the government, as in the Indiana State Sentinel paragraph Morton sent to Lincoln. A Dubuque Herald editorial told its readers, “There is but one way to deal with arbitrary power, and that is to treat it precisely as one would do … with a highwayman who might undertake to rob him of his money.” Copperhead editors incited desertion, telling Union soldiers that, since Lincoln’s proclamation had changed the character of the war, they were no longer under any obligation to fight. “You perceive that it is to emancipate slaves … that you are used as soldiers,” hissed the Herald. “Are you, as soldiers, bound by patriotism, duty or loyalty to fight in such a cause?”

  Taking advantage of the political ferment in early 1863, the Copperhead press organized and advertised anti-Lincoln “county meetings” all over the Northwest. These mass gatherings typically started with denunciations of the Emancipation Proclamation and then, as each speaker tried to draw an angrier response from the crowd than the man before him, escalated into resolutions to stop the war, vows to resist the draft, and out-and-out demands that the Northwestern states break away to form a new confederacy:

  Van Buren County, Michigan: “Since the war has been converted from its original purpose of a restoration of the Union under the Constitution, we are opposed to furnishing means or men.”

  Wapello County, Iowa: “[We] deliberately and firmly pledge ourselves, one to another, that we will not render support to the present Administration in carrying on its wicked abolition crusade against the South; that we will resist to the death all attempts to draft any of our citizens into the army.”

  Brown County, Indiana: “Our interests and our inclinations will demand of us a withdrawal from political association in a common government with the New England States.”

  Douglas County, Illinois: “We regard the emancipation proclamation … as the entering wedge which will ultimately divide the middle and northwestern States from our mischiefmaking, puritanical, fanatical New England brethren, and finally culminate in the formation of a Democratic republic out of the middle, northwestern and southern States. And for this we are thankful.”

  Suddenly warnings were everywhere that, just as Lincoln’s election had sparked the secession of the South out of fear that he would abolish slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation would spark the secession of the Northwest now that the fear had been made real. On January 1, the very day of the Proclamation, former Supreme Court justice Benjamin R. Curtis wrote, “It is quite certain that a very unfriendly feeling towards [Massachusetts] now exists in the West & N. West, & a western member of the cabinet [probably Caleb Smith of Indiana] told me decidedly that if a division of the country should take place, it would not be an East & West line. He evidently had little hope.” On January 13, Ohio Congressman Samuel “Sunset” Cox appeared before a large gathering of Democrats in New York City, and, in a speech that branded Lincoln’s Proclamation as “Puritanism in Politics,” made the same terrible augury as Curtis:

  My apprehension is, that before the people can thoroughly reform the conduct of their government, another civil strife may be raging; not the South against the North; not slave against free States; but the North against itself… . Abolition has made the Union, for the present, impossible. An aroused people may strike blindly and madly, and the result may be the formation of new alliances among the States and fresh conflicts among the people… . The erection of the States watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries into an independent Republic … is becoming more than a dream. It is the talk of every other western man. They do not intend to be ruled by the Constitution-breaking, law-defying negro-loving Phariseeism of New England!

  On January 21, Lincoln’s confidant Orville Browning was informed firsthand of the alarming developments in Illinois. He recorded in his diary:

  At night called to see Mr & Mrs Corning, and had a talk with him on the State of the Country. He is very despondent and thinks the radical and extreme policy of the administration has made the restoration of the Union impossible in any other way than by the North Western States forming an alliance with the States of the lower Mississippi. If this were done he thinks Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey &c would soon join, and ultimately the remaining states, and that thus we might become again one people.

  Murat Halstead, from his vantage point as editor of the Cincinnati Gazette, warned his senator, John Sherman, about the public mood after emancipation:

  There is a change in the current of public sentiment out West … . If Lincoln was not a damn fool, we could get along yet. He is an awful, woeful ass, and therefore all the enemies of the government look to him to give them all the capital that is necessary … . But what we want is not any more niggers—not any if you please.

  On January 31, a panicked Governor Morton wired Lincoln, “It is important that I should see you a few hours but I cannot leave long enough to go to Washington. Can you meet me at Harrisburg?” Lincoln declined and suggested that Morton write a letter instead, explaining that at such a troubled time the absence of both leaders from their capitals would be “misconstrued a thousand ways.” On February 9, Lincoln received Morton’s letter divulging what he had hoped to reveal to the President face-to-face:

  The Democratic scheme may be briefly stated thus; End the war by any means whatever at the earliest moment.

  This of course lets the Rebel States go, and acknowledges the Southern Confederacy. They will then propose to the Rebels a re-union and re-construction upon the condition of leaving out the New England States; this they believe the Rebel leaders will accept and so do I… .

  Every democratic paper in Indiana is teeming with abuse of New England and it is the theme of every speech … . These views are already entertained by the mass of the Democratic party, and there is great danger of their spreading until they are embraced by a large majority of our people, unless means are promptly used to counteract them. They are using every means in their power to corrupt and debauch the public mind.

  Secret societies, which are but another type of the Knights of the Golden Circle, are being established in every County and Township in the State of Indiana, Speeches, Pamphlets and Newspapers are distributed in vast numbers and at great expense, and every man who can or will read is bountifully supplied, with the most treasonable and poisonous literature.

  This last paragraph of Governor Morton’s letter signaled other, murkier threats in the Northwest than those being proclaimed publicly in the legislatures, newspapers, and county meetings. Secret societies were engaged in treason, and they were spreading and strengthening in the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Chief among them were the Knights of the Golden Circle, named for the dreamed-of slave empire encircling the Gulf of Mexico. Lincoln had heard them mentioned with frightening frequency lately. Morton’s excitable intelligence chief, Henry B. Carrington, included an alarm in a letter to Lincoln in mid-January “respecting the existance [sic] and character of the Secret societies existing in Indiana and having for their direct object our national ruin.” It told him:

  Their oaths, signs, grips, &c, have direct relation to the following avowed objects.

  1st The desertion of soldiers.

  2d The inducement of officers to surrender, when attacked.

  3d To oppose the further prosecution of the war and to compel peace; or, to break up the Union and consolidate the South and North-west.

  4th To embarass the General and State Governments in all their efforts to promote genuine loyalty; and throw state policy, and state rights, into seeming antagonism with Federal policy and Federal authority. Not only do these societies avow these objects distinctly; but quite a number of newspapers avow similar purpose and policy, under a thin veil of subterfuge. Public meetings are full of it.

  Letters to Illinois Congressman Washburne and Senator Trumbull were rife with warnings that bands of men were arming and drilling, openly singing Confederate songs, and threatening to murder or “burn out” Union men. Increa
singly, Northwesterners were terrified by visions of their countryside turned red with neighbors’ blood. One man, W. Holmes of southern Illinois, wrote to Lincoln describing nightly drunken “orgies” by Knights of the Golden Circle at a local saloon, where public cheers for Jeff Davis were loud. “The few union men of [Williamson County] live in great fear as to their property and persons,” he reported. “At this present time there are union men who dare not return to their homes for fear of being dragged forth into the woods some night and cruelly maltreated.” He said that the entire 128th Illinois regiment, recruited from the region, were southern sympathizers. Holmes ended by telling the President, “The fierce and bloody Spirit of opposition to you Sir, and to the Govt of the Union, that exists in our midst, is I think more to be dreaded than an army of Rebels in the fields.”

  Another loyal correspondent wrote to Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay to warn of an impending Illinois revolution set for Washington’s Birthday:

  It has now Become a Settled fact that we are to have a Blooddy Revolution in old [P]ike [County] & through the central & Southern portions of the State …, the disloyal … outnumber us two to one and have been largely ReEnforced by Sevearl Hundred from Missouri Bushwhackers & Bridge Burners that ware Driven from that State & took Refuge here they together with the coperhead Democrats have many Lodges of the K. G. C.s [Knights of the Golden Circle] with a membership of over 2000, well armed and have Resolved to resist the Government, disarm Union men & Claim the right to appropriate the property of Union men, and are now discussing in their secrit meeting the pallicy of Rising in mass at an Early day, Say (Feb 22d).

  A nervous letter arrived on Lincoln’s desk from Governor Yates, requesting “at least 4 regiments of well armed men in Illinois” to prevent an insurrection. Yates expected that the loyal regiments would soon be fighting pitched battles against thousands of armed deserters from the army who were sneaking home. Told by the Copperhead press and politicians that they had no obligation to fight a war to free slaves, soldiers were further encouraged to desert by disaffected relatives at home, who wrote letters such as this one, from a father to his son:

  I am sorry that you are engaged in this war, which has no other purpose but to free the negroes and enslave the whites; to overrun the free States with a negro population and place us all, who labor for a living, on an equality with d—d negroes sent on us by abolitionists, who alone are in favor of prosecuting this unholy, unconstitutional and hellish war.

  Another father told his son to “come home, if you have to desert, you will be protected—the people are so enraged that you need not be alarmed if you hear of the whole of our Northwest killing off the abolitionists.”

  Discontented men in the ranks wrote back, such as this Hoosier private:

  As soon as I get my money … I am coming home let it be deserting or not, but if they don’t quit freeing the niggers and putting them in the north I won’t go back any more … it is very wrong to live with the niggers in freedom.

  … and this Hoosier captain:

  I have just read the presidents proclamation. I don’t like it. I don’t want to fight to free the Darkeys. If any body else wants to do so, They are welcome to come & do so. I am not willing to stay in the army much longer, unless a different policy is inaugurated.

  Desertions in the Union army averaged 5,000 per month in the hopestarved days of early 1863. In January the 109th Illinois regiment at Holly Springs, Mississippi, became so mutinous—some men deserting and others vowing they would never fight for emancipation—that the whole regiment was disbanded. By March the 128th Illinois regiment, with a nominal strength of 1,000, was reduced by desertions to 35 men. As they straggled home, deserters formed bands for self-protection and raiding. Once they reached the sanctuary of their old neighborhoods, they joined up with secret societies operating after dark. Armed, desperate, and accustomed to bloodshed, the deserters gave those societies a new, deadlier character. Authorities received reports of fresh activity in guns and ammunition. Loyal citizens were forced to keep their weapons always within reach as the vicious returnees started attacking them and their property. Guerrilla warfare seized the southern counties of the Northwest. One press item reported that, “A party of soldiers sent to Rush County, Indiana, captured six deserters. On their way to the cars the deserters were rescued by ‘Southern sympathizers’ armed with rifles. Two companies of infantry were then sent from Indianapolis, and the deserters again taken into custody.” In another incident, seventeen deserters made a fortress of a log cabin, and defied arrest with the help of locals who smuggled in food.

  * * *

  The treasonous stirrings in the rural southern counties of the Northwest brought recruiting in the region to a full stop. On February 1, Governor David Tod of Ohio wired the War Department that volunteering was about played out in the Buckeye State. Faced with a rapidly developing manpower shortage in the Union armies, and with war-weariness gripping the country, Congress reacted by pushing through a new Conscription Act on March 3, 1863.

  Not only was the draft resented as un-American and incompatible with freedom, the Conscription Act took recruitment out of the hands of the states—where tradition had it and where the Militia Act of the previous summer had let it remain—and made it the responsibility of the federal government for the first time in American history. The new draft law was hated, moreover, because of an ill-considered clause that allowed any able-bodied draftee to avoid service by sending a substitute in his place or by paying $300. The practice of hiring substitutes was a traditional practice borrowed from France, where conscription had a long history. The $300 clause was meant to put a limit on the amount negotiated by a substitute, so that a man of moderate means could afford to buy his way out. Even so, there was explosive protest that the inequities in the Conscription Act made the war “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Immediately after the passage of the Conscription Act, Lincoln received a warning from Joseph Medill of Chicago: “Since I have lived in Illinois I never witnessed greater hostility to any public measure than that existing against … the new conscript law… . The attempt to draft under it will surely be the signal for general and bloody resistance.” Governor Morton, too, alerted Lincoln, “I can assure you that [the $300 exemption] feature in the Bill is creating much excitement and ill feeling towards the Government among the poorer classes generally, … and may … lead to a popular storm.”

  A clash was inevitable. Congress created the elaborate machinery of the Provost Marshals Bureau, which sent federal officials into the hinterlands to enroll the more than three million male citizens between the ages of twenty and forty-five. To many, here was visible proof that the tentacles of Lincoln’s government were curling around every American. Before now, only the humble mailman had been a visible presence of the federal government in daily life. Now, the appearance of United States enrollers going house to house provoked fears that the federal power had slipped the familiar bonds of the Constitution. The Chatfield (Minnesota) Democrat predicted that the small army of provost marshals fanning out into every congressional district would “obliterate state lines,” and snarled, “No despot in the world today wields a greater power over the persons of his subjects than does King Abraham the First.” Congressman Clifton White of Ohio saw the federal draft as “part and parcel of a grand scheme for the overthrow of the Union… . Arm the Chief magistrate with this power—and what becomes of the State Legislatures? … What becomes of State constitutions and State laws?” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper declared that “this law converts the Republic into one grand Military dictatorship.”

  There was violent resistance to the draft in every Northwestern state. Enrollment sheets were stolen. Draft enrollers were assaulted, some murdered. Cautious enrollers were forced to go one district at a time, with Union troops handy to crush pockets of resistance, as in Holmes County, Ohio, where about a thousand protesters built a makeshift fort and prepared to defend it with squirrel rifles, revolvers, and
four artillery pieces. As the machinery of the draft rumbled across the Northwest, hostility against Lincoln—blasted by the Copperhead press, cursed in public meetings, and threatened in saloons after dark by oath-bound gangs—threatened to boil over into a second civil war.

  At this worst possible time, the earnest, inept General Ambrose Burnside came onto the scene. After the fallout over the tragedy at Fredericksburg and a subsequent fiasco called the “Mud March,” Lincoln had relieved Burnside of command of the Army of the Potomac and reassigned him to command the Department of the Ohio, a huge area that included the volatile Northwestern states. Arriving at his new headquarters in Cincinnati on March 23, he was treated to tales of vast conspiracies dished up by Henry B. Carrington and Governor Morton of Indiana, who told him that the Knights of the Golden Circle were 90,000 strong and that they were being armed by guns smuggled up through Kentucky. Burnside meanwhile read orders from General-in-Chief Halleck urging “more rigid treatment of all disloyal persons.”

  Burnside was not a nimble-minded man. He did not comprehend subtleties. He saw criticism of the government as treason, and believed in force as a cure. Halleck’s orders were just the sort of thing he could understand. On April 13, 1863, Burnside wired his own instructions to his entire department. Titled “General Order No. 38,” they stated:

  The habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed in this department. Persons committing such offenses will be at once arrested with a view of being tried … or sent beyond our lines into the lines of their friends. It must be understood that treason, expressed or implied, will not be tolerated in this department.