Our Jimmy has gone for to live in a tent,
They have grafted him into the army;
He finally pucker’d up courage and went,
When they grafted him into the army.
I told them the child was too young, alas!
At the captain’s forequarters, they said he would pass—
They’d train him up well in the infantry class—
So they grafted him into the army.
—Henry Clay Work
Lincoln and Stanton faced a potentially disastrous manpower shortage in the spring of 1863. More than one hundred regiments of two-year and nine-month enlisted men were demobilizing all at the same time. Death, desertion, and illness had already depleted the army’s ranks at a disturbing rate, while bloody debacles like the defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville had reduced volunteerism to a trickle. Even the generous signing bonuses, or bounties, that enlistment offices had begun tacking on in the fall of 1862 as added enticement weren’t working.
One of the bestselling songs of the war came out in 1863 and expressed the general sentiment: “Weeping, Sad and Lonely,” also known as “When This Cruel War Is Over.” Composer Henry Tucker of Brooklyn and lyricist Charles Carroll Sawyer, a Yankee émigré to New York, wrote it; Wood’s Minstrels (as in Henry Wood, Fernando and Benjamin’s brother) introduced it in their hall on lower Broadway, and the Fulton Street firm of Sawyer & Thompson published the sheet music. Its doleful melody and extraordinarily sad lyrics (“Oft in dreams I see thee lying on the battle plain / Lonely, wounded, even dying, calling but in vain”) struck a deep chord. Reputedly a million copies of the sheet music sold, in the South as well as the North. It’s said that one Union general forbade his men from singing it in camp because it took all the fight out of them.
Regardless, the Union needed another three hundred thousand men in uniform, and there seemed only one way to get them. In March, Lincoln finally signed the Enrollment Act, making able-bodied men between twenty-five and forty eligible for conscription. The Confederacy, with its much smaller pool of men, had already resorted to conscription; Union states had drafted militiamen since 1862, and many Northern politicians had been calling on Lincoln to begin federal conscription since then.
Nevertheless, the men who were most likely to be drafted, and their families, reacted with widespread disobedience and localized eruptions of murderous rage. Two aspects of the law particularly rankled. For one, at Lincoln’s insistence, the law was worded vaguely enough to make black men as well as white men eligible. Democrats complained that Lincoln was using the war as an excuse to advance his Black Republican agenda. For another, a draftee could buy his way out of service, either by paying a three-hundred-dollar commutation fee or by hiring a replacement. Three hundred dollars was equal to the average workingman’s annual salary. “The laboring classes,” Maria Daly noted, “say that they are sold for three hundred dollars, whilst they pay one thousand dollars for Negroes.” For many workers, this blatantly class-based exemption was proof that it was “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.” A parody of “We Are Coming, Father Abraham” made the rounds:
We are coming, ancient Abraham, several hundred strong
We hadn’t no 300 dollars and so we come along
We hadn’t no rich parents to pony up the tin
So we went unto the provost and there were mustered in
Adding a final insult, at the same time that Congress passed the Enrollment Act it ratified the blanket suspension of habeas corpus that Lincoln had proposed back in the fall.
Up to this point, states had been responsible for recruitment. A national draft meant constructing a large new federal bureaucracy: investigators to fan out through the North and compile lists of potential draftees, new enrollment offices in every locale, provost officers to man them, enforcement agents to track down draft dodgers. In the end it entailed some 75,000 new jobs. The Chicago Tribune wondered if it wouldn’t have been more efficient simply to put all those employees in uniform and send them to the front.
Although New York City would be the site of the most infamous antidraft rebellion, there was resistance throughout the Union. Draft dodging was rampant. Of the roughly 292,000 names pulled in the first draft in 1863, almost 40,000 men never showed up. By war’s end, some 160,000 males would have turned draft dodgers. Just as during the Vietnam War, many would flee to Canada for the duration. Many others went to New York City and melted into the milling crowds there. The mood in the city was such that most citizens were more likely to buy a deserter a drink than to turn him in. From the start, investigators who went door-to-door gathering the information for eligibility lists met with hostile and sometimes deadly response. By war’s end thirty-eight of them had been murdered and another sixty wounded. Besides New York, antidraft riots would break out in cities all along the East Coast and as far west as Chicago and Detroit, as well as in coal-mining regions.
From the moment the draft and the suspension of habeas corpus became law, New York’s Copperheads and Catholic newspapermen howled at these outrageous new signs of Lincoln’s despotism. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated predicted that the draft would turn the Union into “one grand military dictatorship.” James McMaster called it the act of a “deluded and almost delirious fanatic.” The Metropolitan Record & New York Vindicator, a Catholic family paper that was partly funded by Archbishop Hughes after he backed away from McMaster’s Freeman’s Journal, protested in articles with headlines like “Five Hundred Thousand More Victims to Abolitionism” and “The United States Converted into a Military Despotism? The Conscription Act the Last Deadly Blow Aimed at Popular Liberty.” The paper’s Irish editor, John Mullaly, had originally supported the war, but turned Copperhead with the Emancipation Proclamation, which he had denounced as “a vile and infamous document” that he felt excused the Irish from participating any further in the army. He had also predicted a full-on war between the races.
Dennis Mahony, former editor of the Dubuque Herald, a fiercely antiwar and anti-Lincoln Catholic newspaper, had just moved to New York. In 1862, after a barrage of scathing editorials in which he had called for Lincoln’s impeachment and protested “Nigger Suffrage, and Equality, Beecherism, Stoweism, Niggerism, and a dozen isms and Tom fooleries,” he’d been arrested by federal marshals and conveyed to the Old Capital Prison in Washington, where he was held four months without any charges ever being filed. Now in New York he put out a collection of his rants in a book titled The Prisoner of State.
Clement Vallandigham, king of Copperheads, came to New York as soon as the Enrollment Act was passed to speak to its Peace Democrats. Then he went to Albany to meet with Governor Seymour, who spoke out against conscription as unconstitutional, while hoping to raise enough volunteers to make the draft unnecessary in his state.
This was Vallandigham’s last trip to New York for a while. He returned to Ohio, where General Ambrose Burnside now commanded the army’s Department of the West, with headquarters in Cincinnati. Disgraced and already in a foul temper after his defeat at Fredericksburg, Burnside quickly discovered that the Northwest—Michigan, Indiana, Vallandigham’s Ohio, and Lincoln’s Illinois—was a seething nest of Copperheads. There were also many settlers who’d migrated from the South with their sympathies intact. They came to be known as Butternuts, for their faded yellowish clothes and for the uniforms of similar color many Confederate troops wore. It was said that tens of thousands of Copperheads and Butternuts belonged to traitorous secret militias like the Knights of the Golden Circle, in some ways a precursor to the Ku Klux Klan. They were plotting to rise up in armed revolt to establish their own Northwest Confederacy, aligned with the South.
Burnside was having none of that on his watch. On his own authority he issued a decree in April that anyone “declaring sympathy for the enemy” faced arrest and a military trial. Vallandigham, true to character, denounced the decree as tyrannical and unconstitutional, and he openly defied it. One night in May, Burnside sent troops to drag him out of bed. As expected, a military tribunal pronounced him guilty and sentenced him to prison.
Democrats around the Union rose up in protest. In New York, Manton Marble, editor of the World, denounced Burnside and the Lincoln administration, while The Sun chided, “The Union can survive the assaults of all the armed and disarmed Vallandighams of the South and North, but it cannot long exist without free speech and free press.” The Wood brothers staged a large protest rally, at which both McMaster and Mullaly called for all citizens of New York to arm themselves and stand ready to “defend the liberties of their state” against such federal tyranny. Erastus Corning staged a rally in Albany and wrote Lincoln a stinging rebuke. Greeley took Lincoln’s side in this fight. He published Lincoln’s reply to Corning in the Tribune, and had fifty thousand copies printed and distributed as a pamphlet. “I think the time not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many,” Lincoln wrote. “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley [sic] agitator who induces him to desert?”
The protests continued. Lincoln and his cabinet worried that an imprisoned Vallandigham would be a perfect Copperhead martyr, so they banished him to the Confederacy instead. But the South didn’t want him either; for all his bitter opposition to Lincoln, he was not a Confederate sympathizer. When Vallandigham requested permission to board a blockade runner and try to make it to neutral Canada, President Davis happily agreed.
Vallandigham would reach Halifax in early July and head for Lake Ontario, where Toronto and Niagara Falls were crowded with an odd lot of Union deserters and draft dodgers, escaped Confederate POWs, Confederate and Union spies and counterspies, Copperheads, and assorted adventurers, profiteers, and con men. The neutral Canadians welcomed them all, as long as they paid their bar tabs and hotel bills in gold or silver. From these Civil War Casablancas in 1864 would emanate several Confederate plots to destabilize and terrorize the Union, including New York City.
In June, Peace Democrats staged a giant rally at Cooper Union that drew an estimated thirty thousand New Yorkers, mostly workers. Lincoln was roundly booed every time his name was mentioned, Vallandigham cheered. Fernando Wood was the star speaker. “We have fallen upon evil times,” he declared. “The war should cease, because it never should have been commenced.… Because there was no necessity for it. An amicable adjustment of the questions in dispute could have been, and can be still, procured on terms of fairness and equality.… Because it is made a pretext for the most outrageous and damnable crimes against the liberty of the citizen.… Because the popular enthusiasm necessary to conduct the war and supply the failing armies has subsided. Force, by a draft, cannot supply the indispensable requisite.” The multitude received his remarks with “unlimited cheering and beating of drums,” the Times reported, and “every species of noise the human voice, feet and hands can make.” In an editorial a few days later, Henry Raymond scoffed at “Fernando’s Farce,” pointing out how ironic it was “to hear a dozen loud-mouthed demagogues denouncing President Lincoln as a bloody tyrant, a vile despot, a monster of arbitrary devices, who would not allow his trampled, trembling subjects to hold, still less to utter, opinions contrary to his own.… Really, the joke is already stale.”
It wasn’t just among Copperheads that opinions of Lincoln were sinking. “Well, Walt, you and I cannot agree in regard to ‘Uncle Abe,’” Jeff Whitman wrote that June. “Everything he does reminds me of an old woman. I hope that the country will last long enough for this damned war to fall through.”