by Larry Tagg
Burnside declared that those who committed “acts for the benefit of the enemies of our country” would be “tried as spies or traitors,” punishable by death.
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The person most interested in Burnside’s Order Number 38 was his new neighbor, Clement L. Vallandigham of Dayton, Ohio. Vallandigham was a handsome forty-two-year-old Democratic congressman who aspired to be the next governor of Ohio. He had achieved notoriety as the leader of the Peace Democrats in the House of Representatives, and had been the darling of the Copperhead press since the first summer of the war. His motto, “Not a man or a dollar for the war,” had guided his every vote since Sumter. Now, in the spring of 1863, he and the Peace Democrats were more popular than ever, lifted up by disgust with Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the recent Union military defeats.
Vallandigham had blown the ram’s horn for the Copperhead movement most recently on January 14, when he had risen in the House to repeat his favorite themes: that the South could never be defeated, and that the war had only produced “defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchres … the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation … of freedom of the press and of speech … which have made this country one of the worst despotisms on earth.” As for emancipation, he saw “more of barbarism and sin … in the continuance of the war … and the enslavement of the white race by debt and taxes and arbitrary power” than in black slavery. His answer? “Stop fighting. Make an armistice.” Democrats who wanted an immediate end to the war had leaped up and cheered, especially in his native Ohio and the Northwest.
Home from Congress in April, Vallandigham learned of Burnside’s order and saw an opportunity to be lifted into the governor’s office as a martyr to freedom. With enough advance publicity to make sure that Burnside’s agents were present, Vallandigham on May 1 made an appearance at a Democratic rally in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. With three of Burnside’s agents in the crowd taking notes, Vallandigham gave a defiant two-hour Copperhead harangue, exhorting the crowd of 20,000—many wearing their copper Liberty-head badges—to come together at the ballot box and throw off the despotism of “King Lincoln.”
On pads of paper, Burnside’s scribbling secret agents caught every verbal bomb Vallandigham threw, and three days later a squad of soldiers arrived at his home in the middle of the night, beat down the door with axes and dragged him off to the screams of his hysterical wife. They hustled him to a train, took him to Cincinnati, and pushed him into a cell in a military prison. Two days later, a military tribunal convicted him of violating Order No. 38 and sentenced him to spend the rest of the war in a stone casemate in Fort Warren, Boston Harbor.
Burnside’s kangaroo court was the last thing Lincoln needed. In midafternoon on May 6, 1863, the same day he got word of Vallandigham’s arrest, Lincoln received a telegram informing him that the Army of the Potomac, now under General Joseph Hooker, had been defeated at the Battle of Chancellorsville by Lee with an army half its size. Reporter Noah Brooks was in Lincoln’s office talking with a friend when the President came into the room. “I shall never forget that picture of despair,” Brooks wrote. “He held a telegram in his hand, and as he closed the door and came toward us I mechanically noticed that his face, usually sallow, was ashen in hue… . The appearance of the President … was piteous. Never, as long as I knew him, did he seem to be so broken, so dispirited, and so ghostlike. Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room, saying, ‘My God! My God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’”
The catastrophe at Chancellorsville plunged the nation yet again into deep gloom over the war effort, coming on top of bad news from stalled armies everywhere along the front—at Vicksburg, in middle Tennessee, and at Charleston. There were renewed cries against Lincoln’s futile butchery. The Bangor (Maine) Democrat published a doggerel verse that lampooned an earlier war poem, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham”:
You saw those mighty legions, Abe,
And heard their manly tread;
You counted hosts of living men—
Pray—can you count the dead?
Look o’er the proud Potomac, Abe,
Virginia’s hill along;
Their wakeful ghosts are beck’ning you,
Two hundred thousand strong.
Coming on the heels of the news from Chancellorsville, news of Vallandigham’s arrest stoked Lincoln’s dreaded “fire in the rear” to a white heat. Hundreds of angry partisans in Vallandigham’s hometown of Dayton rioted, burning down a city block. Democrats everywhere were appalled. Martial law enforced hundreds of miles from the nearest front line? A political candidate with years of service in Congress locked up for making a campaign speech? It was a caricature of tyranny, the most paranoid nightmare of the most wild-eyed editor. Coming at the climax of the unrest in the Northwest, the case dominated the national political news.
Lincoln’s secretaries wrote later that no act of the government was so strongly criticized as the Vallandigham arrest. The New York Atlas typified the temper of the Democratic press, declaring that “the tyranny of military despotism” shown in the arrest demonstrated “the weakness, folly, oppression, mismanagement and general wickedness of the administration.” The New York Herald rued the arrest as only the first of “a series of fatal steps which must terminate at last in bloody anarchy.” At a May 15 rally in New York City, the cradle of anti-Lincolnism in the East, speaker after speaker condemned the Lincoln government, one roaring, “the man who occupied the Presidential chair in Washington was tenfold a greater traitor to the country than was any Southern rebel.” On May 16, New York’s Governor Horatio Seymour listed Lincoln’s latest outrages in a letter to a meeting of Albany Democrats who were then considering their own protest:
[Vallandigham’s arrest] interfered with the freedom of speech; it violated our rights to be secure in our homes against unreasonable searches and seizures; it pronounced sentence without a trial, save one which was a mockery … . [I]t is not merely a step towards revolution—it is revolution; it will not only lead to military despotism—it established military despotism. If it is upheld, our liberties are overthrown… The action of the Administration will determine, in the minds of more than one-half of the people of the loyal States, whether this war is waged to put down rebellion at the South, or to destroy free institutions at the North.
Even Republican editors condemned the “lost rights” demonstrated by Vallandigham’s arrest, and their pain was reprinted in such anti-Lincoln journals as The Crisis, which told its readers exultantly, “every Republican paper in the city of New York opposes the arrest of Mr. Vallandigham except the Times. This speaks volumes.” The Democratic Louisville Journal published a long list of protesting Republican papers, “the ablest and most influential champions of the Republican party, backed … by at least three-fourths of the Republican party itself.” The Cabinet, too, regretted the arrest. Gideon Welles considered it “arbitrary and injudicious. Good men who wish to support the administration, find it difficult to defend these acts.”
The nation waited for some decision from Lincoln on Vallandigham’s fate. To do nothing—to have the spokesman for the Copperheads scribbling tracts from a stone cell in an American Bastille in Boston Harbor—would be to invite a lasting catastrophe.
Rather than thus abetting Vallandigham’s martyrdom, Lincoln reached for a kingly solution reminiscent of James I’s expulsion of the Puritans: he banished him. Vallandigham was led through the lines to a rebel outpost in Tennessee and handed over to Southern leaders, who greeted him reluctantly.
When they convened for their state convention, the Ohio Democrats, caught up in the excitement of the moment, unanimously chose Vallandigham for their candidate for governor. They expected that a Vallandigham campaign would call attention to the dictatorship of Lincoln. Vallandigham’s name would crystallize the voters’ choice in the fall election to one between peace and war. His exile would be powerful, ongoing proof that Lincoln was a tyrant trampling on basic rights.
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With much of the North like dry tinder to the lit match of Vallandigham’s arrest, there was new urgency to a tip Lincoln received from a Philadelphia customs house official, dated April 7:
I enclose herewith an exact copy of an Anonymous letter received by me this morning. I have recd several of somewhat similar import, and have also information from individual members of the “Southern League” alias “K. G. C.” sufficient to convince me that a devilish and deep laid scheme is already concocted throughout the North to seize all the Arms at a favorable moment, and use them against the Government.
The time supposed to be best suited for this rally of northern traitors is when the Government shall attempt the execution of the Conscript Act.
The informer recommended that the loyal people of the North be organized into regiments to combat the Copperheads.
It appeared increasingly likely that loyal regiments might be needed. The mid-May Copperhead rally-goers in New York City heard J.A. McMasters, the editor of Freeman’s Journal, call on opponents of Lincoln to prepare to battle for states’ rights, “not by street fighting, not by disorganized opposition. They should organize by tens and hundreds, by companies and regiments, and they should send to their Governor and ask him for commissions as soon as they had their regiments formed. They should keep their arms, and if they had not them, they should get them, and be ready, under their gallant Governor, to defend the liberties of their State.”
This sounded eerily like the calls to arms in the South that had preceded the war. On June 3 in New York City, another huge Copperhead mass meeting was held at the Cooper Union that overflowed the building and spilled out into the street. Addresses were interrupted by groans and hisses for President Lincoln, and loud cheers for Vallandigham and peace. The gathering made a solemn declaration:
Now, if, as is thus proven, the States, as such are sovereign, and that the Federal Government is simply a compact between the parties, with authority exceedingly restricted and definitely limited, can this feeble authority make war upon the States? …
Therefore, this war of the General Government against the South is illegal, being unconstitutional, and should not be sustained if we are to regard the Constitution as still binding and in force.
The New York Democrats were making the same states’ rights claims that the Confederate states had made to justify secession in 1861, and soon there were unsettling rumors that there would be pitched battle on the streets of New York. On June 29, Governor Seymour was privately informed that a small army of 1,800 deserters had banded together in New York City with a large body of Copperheads to oppose the draft. The plot was set to explode when the draft began in July, just as the customs house official had warned Lincoln. The governor went through the motions of protecting public property by putting guards in front of the city’s armories and arsenals, but the blue lines were thin: thousands of Union soldiers had recently left to confront Lee at Gettysburg, and the city was empty of troops.
Then, with the draft lottery only a few days away, Governor Seymour recklessly loosed the Furies in the nation’s largest city. He beckoned Democrats to a mammoth Fourth of July rally with a circular that began: “Freemen, awake! In everything, and in most stupendous proportion, is this Administration abominable!” When the crowds gathered on Independence Day, Seymour treated them to a public demonizing of Lincoln. Liberty itself was suspended, he shouted, “men deprived of the right of trial by jury, men torn from their homes by midnight intruders.” The country was on “the very verge of destruction,” not because of rebels—they were not mentioned—but because of government coercion, “seizing our persons, infringing upon our rights, insulting our homes, depriving us of those cherished principles for which our fathers fought.” He issued a bold threat to the President: “Do you not create revolution when you say that our persons may be … seized, our property confiscated, our homes entered? The bloody, and treasonable, and revolutionary, doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government.”
Sober men regretted the governor’s tirade as an incitement to riot. There were editors, however, who were happy for it. On July 13, the first Monday morning of the draft lottery in New York, the city’s Democratic newspapers blasted Lincoln. The World protested the draft as “profoundly repugnant to the American mind,” “thrust into the statute-book … almost by force.” The Daily News saw a plot: “The miscreants at the head of the Government are bending all their powers … to securing a perpetuation of their ascendancy for another four years; and their triple method of accomplishing this purpose is, to kill off Democrats, stuff the ballot-box with bogus soldier votes, and deluge … districts with negro suffrages.” “One out of about two and a half of our citizens,” it wailed, “are destined to be brought off into Messrs. Lincoln & Company’s charnel-house. God forbid!” It ended with the mutinous hope “that instant measures will be taken to prevent the outrage.”
As if by a signal, “instant measures” came that morning: a pistol shot rang out in front of the draft office at Third Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, where the lottery drawing had just begun. At the crack of the revolver, the large crowd that had assembled in the street hurled a shower of missiles at the building, then rushed in, smashed furniture and windows, and set it ablaze. Police Superintendent Kennedy was seized and beaten nearly to death. The most deadly riot in American history had begun.
Another mob descended on the Second Avenue Armory. Finding it defended by militia with cannon, they drifted uptown, setting fires and sacking large homes. A limping detachment of loyal veterans from the Invalid Corps, brought in to grapple with the burly mob of stevedores, porters, factory hands, and longshoremen, were overwhelmed and scattered. The angry masses, largely Irishmen, sought out blacks, and where they found them they beat them to death or hanged them, sometimes burning their bodies. The Colored Orphan Asylum at Lexington and Forty-third Street was gutted and burned to the ground while the children escaped out the back. At the end of the day, the moon rose in a sky bright with fires raging all over the city. George Templeton Strong transcribed the street talk into his diary: “If a quarter one hears be true, this is an organized insurrection in the interest of the rebellion and Jefferson Davis rules New York today.”
The next day, July 14, dawned on an entire city shuttered in dread. The mob attacked the mayor’s house, and roamed the city setting more fires, plundering more houses, and catching and murdering more black men, women, and children. A police station on Twenty-second Street went up in a blaze. The Brooks Brothers clothing store, a symbol of the well-heeled upper class, was reduced to ashes.
Governor Seymour was hurried in to calm the roiling sea of rioters. Addressing them as “my friends,” he expressed sympathy with men carried away by “an apprehension of injustice,” but promised the riot would be quenched. At the end of the day, troops fresh from the battlefield of Gettysburg arrived, and grimly sent a ripping, deadly hail into reeling masses of rioters. Herman Melville, from a distant apartment, heard “fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot,” and saw “Red Arson glaring balefully.” George Templeton Strong in his brownstone turret, recognizing the tearing sound of the soldiers’ disciplined volleys and the sudden crack of cannon, scribbled more hopefully: “The people are waking up, and by tomorrow there will be adequate organization to protect property and life.”
The next day, however, terror was undiminished among black citizens, who fled across the Hudson River into New Jersey, and across the East River into Brooklyn. Behind them, the beams and boards of their tenements crashed to the ground in flames, and unlucky blacks who remained were beaten, burned, hanged, and mutilated. The New York Herald, which after the second day had estimated that 150 blacks had been killed and wounded, reported that on the third, “Everywhere throughout the city they are driven about like sheep, and numbers are killed of whom no account will ever be learned.”
Finally, at the end of the fourth
day, with more bodies littering the cobblestones after a final bloody encounter with the Union soldiers, the riots guttered out and the mobs melted back into the squalid neighborhoods of the East Side.
This ugliest spasm of protest against the draft and detestation of the war, which claimed hundreds of victims and millions of dollars in destroyed property, now gave way to solemn weeks of funerals and columns of bitter recriminations in the partisan New York newspapers. On July 14, the New York World published its malediction on Lincoln, blaming him for the death and destruction:
The law-abiding citizen hangs his head with shame that a government can so mismanage a struggle for the life of the nation, so wantonly put itself out of harmony and sympathy with the people, so deny itself the support of those whom it represents and serves … .
“‘Rowdy’ Notion of Emancipation.”
Will the insensate men at Washington now at length listen to our voice? … Will they now believe that Defiance of Law in the rulers breeds Defiance of Law in the people? … Will they continue to stop their ears and shut their eyes to the voice and will of a loyal people, which for three long years has told them by every act and every word that this war must be nothing but a war for the Union and the Constitution?
Does Mr. Lincoln now perceive what alienation he has put between himself and the men who three years ago thundered out with one voice in Union square—“The Union, it must and shall be preserved”? … Did the President and his cabinet imagine that their lawlessness could conquer, or their folly seduce, a free people?
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Though nobody could know it yet, however, the clouds of black smoke that towered over Manhattan in July formed the exclamation point at the climax of the Copperhead struggle against Lincoln. The tears of loyal citizens were the lifeblood of the Copperhead movement. Despair over Union military failure was its hope; only by constant defeat were the Copperheads sustained.
