In the inevitable finger-pointing that followed the fiasco at Bull Run, Raymond and Weed ganged up and blamed Horace Greeley. Raymond charged, rather hypocritically, that the “insane clamor” in the Tribune had forced Lincoln and his generals to move too soon. Weed’s Evening Register accused Greeley of adding a year and thousands of casualties to the war. Dana fought back in a Tribune editorial blaming everything on Lincoln’s cabinet and calling for them all to resign in disgrace. But Greeley published an apology, explaining, “The precise phrase ‘Forward to Richmond!’ is not mine, and I would have preferred not to iterate it.” He added, “If I am needed as a scapegoat for all the military blunders of the last month, so be it. Individuals must die that the nation may live. If I can serve her best in that capacity, I do not shrink from the ordeal.”
If this sounds a little unhinged, it was because Greeley actually was feeling crushing guilt and shame, and the stress pushed him into another bout of brain fever. On July 29 he scrawled an astounding letter to Lincoln, reproaching himself for his role in the debacle. “This is my seventh sleepless night—yours, too, doubtless—yet I think I shall not die, because I have no right to die. I must struggle to live, however bitterly,” it began. Calling himself a “hopelessly broken” man, he asked Lincoln, “Can the Rebels be beaten after all that has occurred, and in view of the actual state of feeling caused by our late awful disaster? If they can—and it is your business to ascertain and decide—write me that such is your judgment, so that I may know and do my duty. And if they cannot be beaten—if our recent disaster is fatal—do not fear to sacrifice yourself to your country.… If the Union is irrevocably gone,” he argued, then war was pointless and “every drop of blood henceforth shed in this quarrel will be wantonly, wickedly shed, and the guilt will rest heavily on the soul of every promoter of the crime.” He signed it, “Yours, in the depth of bitterness.”
Lincoln, who was no stranger to bleak depression himself, kept the letter hidden for three years. When John Hay finally saw it, he called it “the most insane specimen of pusillanimity that I have ever read.” Lincoln was told that Bennett would pay him $10,000 for the right to print Greeley’s letter in the Herald. Lincoln replied, “I need ten thousand dollars very much but he could not have it for many times that.” He wrapped it in red tape and kept it in a desk drawer. It can now be viewed among his papers at the Library of Congress.
In April 1862, Greeley would ask Dana to leave the Tribune. Dana had been Greeley’s right-hand man, and often his surrogate, for fifteen years. “Mr. Greeley never gave a reason for dismissing me, nor did I ever ask for one,” Dana would write in his 1897 Recollections of the Civil War. “I know, though, that the real explanation was that while he was for peace I was for war, and that as long as I stayed on the Tribune there was a spirit there which was not his spirit that he did not like.” Dana accepted an invitation to work for the War Department and would become an assistant secretary of war.
The shock and ignominy of Bull Run pushed Bennett all the way into the war camp. “The war now ceases to be an uninterrupted onward march of our forces southward,” he editorialized. “The government in a single day and at the Capitol of the Nation, is thrown upon the defensive, and under circumstances demanding the most prompt and generous efforts to strengthen our forces at that point. Every other question, all other issues, and all other business, among all parties and all classes of our loyal people, should now be made subordinate to the paramount office of securing Washington.… Action, Action, Action!”
The city’s more doctrinaire Copperhead editors took exactly the opposite lesson from the debacle. The Daily News, Freeman’s Journal, Journal of Commerce, and Day-Book all ratcheted up their attacks against Lincoln, his war, the abolitionists, and Negroes. Benjamin Wood was now openly calling for revolt: “It is time! Wait no longer! Democrats, arise in your might. Throw off your allegiance to the vampires of your party and declare yourselves free men!… Thus will you tame the hyenas of war.”
After the disaster of Bull Run the Republicans had no more tolerance for this type of speech. In August a New York circuit court grand jury charged all these papers with printing seditious opinions. A week later, Lincoln’s postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, ordered the postmaster in New York to suspend the papers’ mailing privileges. In effect this shut them down, since they depended on mail subscribers.
Some editors took the hit stoically. The Day-Book closed its daily edition but continued as a weekly paper, with its name changed to the Caucasian. McMaster, on the other hand, was outraged. In the August 24 issue he promised that the Freeman’s Journal would “live and be published when the tools of the slaves of the present despotism will be buried in an ignominious oblivion.” That was the last issue. For the following three weeks he put out a new Freeman’s Appeal that was even more critical than the Journal. On September 13 the U.S. marshal for New York, Robert Murray, wrote Seward asking what he should do. Seward fired back the next day, “You will arrest him and send him to Fort Lafayette.”
Murray and five deputies showed up at McMaster’s office on the sixteenth to arrest him for sedition. McMaster flew into a rage. He threatened to shoot Murray, his deputies, and Seward as well, though he was found to be unarmed. Handcuffed with manacles taken off a slave ship, he was led out to a waiting carriage. As it rolled, he thrust his manacled hands out the window and shouted to pedestrians, “There! There’s Seward’s work!” He was in a cell at Fort Lafayette an hour later.
Originally called Fort Diamond, Fort Lafayette was built during and after the War of 1812 on a tiny island just offshore of Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. An 1865 piece for the Times would describe it as “a low, diamond-shaped structure, sitting squat upon a little pile of rocks, a few hundred feet from the shore, unattractive, dismal and gloomy with no redemptive sign, save the beautiful flag which floats ever, from sunrise to sunset.” It would disappear under pilings for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the early 1960s.
Through the war, when it was nicknamed the American Bastille, Fort Lafayette housed Confederate POWs and Northern political prisoners accused of all sorts of seditious acts, such as McMaster’s printing of antiwar screeds; resisting or evading the draft; serving on blockade runners; desertion; profiteering; and spying or otherwise actively conspiring against the Union. The war had barely gotten under way when George William Brown, mayor of seditious Baltimore, was imprisoned there as part of General Dix’s effort to keep Maryland from seceding. He wouldn’t be released until November 1862. Because Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, many of Fort Lafayette’s prisoners languished there for long periods without trial.
As wartime prisons went it was very far from the worst. The battlements surrounding the central courtyard held the prisoners’ cells and the offices and living quarters of the commandant, his small staff, and their wives. “Everything is as clean and bright as whitewash and black paint can make it,” the Times reported. “The walls glisten in the sun, the cannon-balls, black as Erebus, shine like the contraband heel [i.e., a Negro’s heel], and the level parade-ground is divested of all irregularities, robbed of every pebble, swept of every surplus particle of dust.”
As long as they caused no trouble, prisoners were treated strictly but kindly by their guards and the commandant, Colonel Martin Burke, a Mexican War veteran and close favorite of General Scott. He earned wide respect “watching over the safety of Uncle Sam’s naughty boys, and obeying to the very letter the orders of his superiors,” the Times said. Burke never set foot off the island during the second two years of the war. This was to avoid being handed summonses to appear in any of the New York civil courts where Tammany judges wanted to grill him for not producing prisoners he was holding without due process. Process-servers from civil courts were prohibited from delivering these summonses to the military island.
After a month in a Fort Lafayette cell, McMaster agreed to sign a loyalty oath—though, characteristically, he insisted it include an addendum protesting the whole affair. He was out by the end of October. He resumed publishing the Freeman’s Journal the following April and went right back to condemning the war as a Republican and abolitionist conspiracy. He would call the Emancipation Proclamation “a palpable and perilous infraction of the Constitution” and Lincoln “as absolute a monarch as the autocrat of all the Russias.”
Revoking the Daily News’ mail rights cut it off from its large subscriber base outside of New York City—a full third of them in the Confederacy, where it had reached them through Louisville. Benjamin Wood had no choice but to suspend publication in September.
He did not stop writing against the war, however; he just did it in another format. He wrote what’s believed to be the only antiwar novel published in the Union during the conflict: Fort Lafayette; or, Love and Secession, published in New York City early in 1862. The story combined antiwar propaganda with a melodramatic potboiler about four young friends, two Southern and two Northern, and the war’s tragic consequences to their lives. After assorted deaths, betrayals, battle scenes, and broken hearts, one of the Northerners is unfairly accused of sedition and confined at Fort Lafayette. Fort Lafayette attracted little attention at the time and soon vanished, not to be seen again until it was republished with a scholar’s introduction as Copperhead Gore in 2006.
As a congressman representing New York Democrats, Wood voted against every war measure that came up. In calmer tones than he had used in his paper, he delivered carefully worded and closely reasoned speeches detailing his objections to the conflict. He predicted, accurately, a protracted and devastating struggle that would inevitably fail to reunify the nation, because the Union could win it only by brutally conquering the South, occupying it, and subjugating its resentful citizens.
Covered by papers throughout the North and South, this new Benjamin Wood, a principled and one might even say conscientious objector to the war, reached a far wider audience than either the novelist or the fire-breathing newspaperman. House Republicans looked for new excuses to silence him. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee initiated hearings to investigate charges that early in the war Wood had sent a Daily News correspondent into the South ferrying secret information to the leaders of the Confederacy. If convicted, Wood would be impeached and imprisoned—most likely in Fort Lafayette. More than two dozen witnesses, many of them taken from their homes and dragged to Washington under guard, offered various species of rumor and hearsay. When it turned out that the star witness against Wood was a fraud and hoaxer, the chairman quietly ended the hearings and had the records locked away, so Wood was never officially exonerated. And he never stopped criticizing.