With victory still far from certain, Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation announcement on September 22, 1862, and the actual promulgation of the policy on January 1, 1863, disturbed further the war-weary Northerners while invigorating those among them more inclined toward abolitionism. Far from abolishing slavery across the land, the president promised to end slavery only in areas that remained in rebellion and outside of the protection of the Constitution on the first day of 1863. Despite limitations, the Emancipation Proclamation signaled the beginning of the end of slavery, something that caused blacks throughout the Northern free states to rejoice.1 The Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, a black abolitionist, christened the proclamation “the most able, manly and important document ever penned by man.”2 In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, African Americans considered the document to be the commencement of “a new era in our country’s history—a day in which injustice and oppression were forced to flee and cower before the benign principles of justice and righteousness.”3 It was for Northern African Americans a signal, a start, not an end in and of itself. “After the feast, comes the reckoning,” wrote editorialist Robert Hamilton in the Weekly Anglo-African. In November 1862, in advance of the final proclamation, the Attorney General Edward Bates had issued a judgment that reversed the federal government’s stand on black citizenship, pronouncing “free men of color, if born in the United States [are]. . . citizens of the United states.” Consequently, Hamilton argued, “why should we not share in the perils of citizenship?” It was time to join the army and fight. It was time to help the freed slaves.4
There were white Northerners who agreed that the war had now become a contest of freedom battling slavery. As an editorialist writing in the Chicago Tribune believed, the proclamation returned America to the vision of the founders, a nation that was “the seat of justice . . . where each man, however humble, shall be entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”5 But at the same time, their more conservative neighbors questioned the political efficacy and the constitutionality of Lincoln’s action. In New Jersey, for example, Republicans generally rallied to the president and editorialists blessed the proclamation as an historical act of essential justice. There were moderates in Lincoln’s New Jersey party, however, who worried about the implementation of the proclamation, and there were conservative Republicans who denounced it.6
Elsewhere, moderate Republicans, unlike more abolitionist-minded radicals, took the proclamation to be a war measure, designed to help hurry along the defeat of the Confederacy. For Connecticut governor William A. Buckingham, abolition was secondary to what he regarded as the chief purpose of the proclamation, namely to have an additional tool with which “to overpower the rebellion, even if it interferes with and overthrows their much-loved system of slavery.”7 Such an interpretation could keep weakening Union coalitions from fissuring, a harder proposition given the progress of the war and the antiblack feelings of so many white Northerners, but it could not keep enthusiastic Democrats from taking political aim at what many white Northerners viewed as a wrong shift in the government’s direction.
Across the country, there remained conservatives, especially among the Democratic opposition, who believed Lincoln lacked the constitutional authority to emancipate slaves. The proclamation, they argued, overrode legitimate restraints and his actions placed his government “in rebellion,” thus making the war “a contest for subjugation.”8 Other antiemancipationists did not wish to see the war for the Union sent along a detour of social experimentation. In 1862 in Centre County, Pennsylvania, opponents of the Lincoln administration had warned their constituents that the government was steering the nation toward an abolitionist war.9 Now it had come to pass, with all of the dire consequences predicted before now reiterated by the opposition. In New Jersey the proclamation added weight to the fear that Northern states would soon be the destination of every absconding, Southern black man, woman, and child. Consequently, the proclamation added a new energy to partisanship, troubling even its advocates about its impact on voters and the future successes of the Republican Party. It was not an imagined concern given the favorable outcome for Democrats in electoral contests in New Jersey and elsewhere.10 In fact, the inauguration of a Democratic governor in New Jersey and another in neighboring New York provided the occasion for the crowds to protest Lincoln’s proclamation.11 Thus, Republican Senator John Sherman of Ohio referred to it as an “ill-timed proclamation.”12
The negative reactions to the proclamation tended to see Lincoln’s action as an attack on the rights of white citizens, especially since the federal government earlier that year had passed the Militia Act of July 17, which threatened conscription if states failed to meet volunteer quotas.13 Also, Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus throughout the Northern states followed closely on the heels of the Preliminary Proclamation.14 In November 1862, a Quincy, Illinois, editorialist warned, “The people will teach the abolition tories that there are other interests beside those of the negro, that should claim the attention of those who are selected to make and execute the laws.” These abolitionists, he continued, “were not satisfied that the war should be prosecuted for the white man, and the rights of the white man, but have persistently clamored for it[s] prosecution for the interests of the inevitable negro.” Beware, he warned, they also “raise the howl for the emigration of these negroes into the northern States,” and expect to force “hundreds and thousands of them into Illinois.”15
Earlier in October, the editor of the Milwaukee German Catholic newspaper Seebote worried that now German and Irish immigrants would end up being “used as fodder for cannons” to secure the abolition of slavery and in the end find themselves “annihilated, to make room for the Negro.”16 Catholic Irish Americans, generally Democrats, opposed the proclamation on constitutional grounds but also feared that the administration was in fact expecting to displace their workingmen with the freed slaves.17 Indeed, in July 1862, there already had been a clash between black and Irish workers on the Chicago docks, sparked by black longshoremen underbidding Irish longshoremen to unload one vessel.18 The prominent Catholic cleric Archbishop John Hughes, who supported a war for the Union, made it clear that his communicants, when confronting forced military service, had no intention of “carrying on a war that costs so much blood and treasure just to gratify a clique of Abolitionists.”19
Regardless of their views, Northerners still had to win the war either to effect emancipation or to reestablish national unity. During 1862, Northerners responded to recruiting rallies with much less enthusiasm than they had at the war’s outset. This was a problem that continued into the next year. In 1863 through the fall, Massachusetts failed to muster a significant number of new black and white recruits, with a decidedly antiemancipationist view in the Irish community contributing to the slow pace of enlistments.20 That otherwise vigorously pro-Union state was not alone.
To help rectify the situation, the government explored other means to raise the necessary manpower, most significantly the recruitment of black men. During late 1862 and early 1863, the army began its tentative approach to enlisting both former Southern slaves and free Northern African Americans. There remained in the North at this time racism enough to prompt the consideration that such an effort would in the end do more harm than good, especially in the wake of Lincoln’s promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation. New Jersey conservatives objected to the implied equality of having black men under arms and continued to argue that the United States was a white man’s country still fighting a white man’s war.21 In July 1863 Sidney Fisher was distressed because “The abolitionists are trying to make what they can out of the enlistment of Negro soldiers & are likely to cause a reaction & injure their own cause & the real interest of the Negro.” Furthermore, he believed, “The orators claim equality for the Negro race, the right of suffrage, &c. All this is as absurd as it is dangerous.”22
African Americans who went off to fight as well as those who remained at home understood that the war should bring to their community those very things Fisher feared. John Rock made clear in his 1864 Syracuse, New York, address that black soldiers were fighting for “liberty and equality.” “We ask the same for the black man that is asked for the white man,” he declared; “nothing more and nothing less.”23 Earlier in 1863, John Abbott, an Illinois African American serving with the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, explained his efforts to the home folks in a similar way noting, “Our motto is, that every man is born free and equal, and that equality we are fighting for . . . until we get it.”24 Military service was just a start, according to Frederick Douglass: “Once in the United States uniform and the colored man has a springing board under him by which he can jump to loftier heights.”25
Ironically, because wartime conditions had provided some Northern black men with greater economic opportunities, they were generally less enthusiastic about joining than they had been in 1861. Also, given the Philadelphian Fisher’s attitude, one shared by many Northerners, the legitimate fear that they would not be treated as well as white soldiers or that they would be fighting for a country that would not recognize their rights as humans and citizens dampened their eagerness to enlist. Nevertheless, Northern blacks joined the army, although about 80 percent of the approximately 180,000 men who served in the U.S. Colored Troops were former slaves from the Confederacy or Union border states.26
These black troops made a difference, but there still came a time when the need for soldiers outstripped the voluntary responses of citizens. The July 1862 Militia Act attempted to answer that need. The act allowed states to draft men for nine months’ service, but also reserved for the federal government the power to intrude into the affairs of states and conduct a draft if the states could not fill assigned quotas with volunteers and lacked the machinery to conscript the men needed. The government put the law to the test in August when it called for 300,000 men to serve for nine months. This call for militiamen was in addition to an earlier July 2 call for 300,000 volunteers for three years of service.27 Also, in July, Congress hoped to encourage enlistments from immigrant communities by speeding along the citizenship process for honorably discharged volunteers.28
The militia draft of 1862 left raising troops primarily in the hands of the states, and the use of bounties helped limit the need to force men to serve. However, that effort was only a prelude to the Enrollment Act of March 1863, which placed the conscription of troops squarely under the authority of the federal government through the Provost Marshal General and the various assistant provost marshals general that he appointed to enforce federal authority in communities throughout the North. Neither law was as oppressive and burdensome as it might have been, and there remained ample opportunities for individuals to avoid conscription when the president used the latter law to call for drafts on four occasions. Not only did the states and the federal government offer some exemptions, but the law of March 1863 also provided an opportunity for a conscript to purchase his way out of service with a $300 commutation fee. The conscript could also find another individual who would serve in his place for a fee, but the commutation fee initially held in check the cost of substitutes. The commutation fee remained in place until the government rescinded it on July 4, 1864.29
States and localities worked hard to avoid the unhappiness of involuntary service. Incentives, patriotic harangues, and shame led Northerners into the army in 1862, saving most states from the necessity of a draft. Pennsylvanian Samuel Cormany admitted after deciding to answer the call, “The fear of being drafted, if I did not volunteer—had possibly some weight in inducing decission [sic].”30 So it was throughout the North. Publicity in favor of volunteering, some of it false, saved Iowa from the militia draft.31 New Jersey, a state where Democrats held a goodly amount of political power, avoided a draft in all but one town in 1862 by filling its quota with volunteers.32 The men of Springfield, Massachusetts, were subjected to calls for patriotic service to save the town from the humiliation of a draft. But as in other communities, the bounty offered by the town might have been an important determining factor.33 In the end, only seven states did not meet their quotas and the War Department secured more men than it had expected.34
Conscripts could not claim bounties, and their fellow volunteer soldiers usually looked down on them, which were additional forceful incentives for enlisting. Communities borrowed and taxed themselves to raise money while bidding against one another to induce men from outside of their boundaries to enlist under their quota requirements. Also, commutation fees and substitutes were not so far beyond the reach of working men that they failed to take advantage of those options. Men subject to conscription banded together in draft insurance clubs, pooling their resources to pay the costs if any of their members were called and wished to avoid service, as did the ten Indiana men who in February 1865 each pledged $200 to supplement Indianapolis funds for the purpose of buying substitutes if any of their number were conscripted. Communities also subsidized the fees and substitute payments of men who wished to avoid service.35
Substitute brokers embarked on a new business as they secured replacements for draftees, which often led to dishonest or at least questionable practices. Brokers in New Jersey found a good source for their inventory among European immigrants new to the state and unfamiliar with the circumstances into which they had just landed.36 Before too long, legal draft evasion was sufficiently common to elicit little comment except from the veterans at the front and Republicans such as newspaper man Joseph Medill, who expected political consequences favoring “The copper-heads [who] are gloating over the prospective harvest of votes they will reap against the bill that ‘puts the rich man’s dirty dollars against a poor man’s life.’”37
For the first two federal drafts, when the commutation was still available, Northern men used it liberally; 85,000 of the 133,000 men required to serve in the army paid the fee.38 On August 2, 1863, George A. Morse, of Woodbury, Vermont, informed his brother that most of the drafted men in the town paid their $300. “[Y]ou know the dra[f]ting law is the meanest law that ever was made,” he added by way of editorial comment sharing Medill’s concern with the war becoming a poor man’s fight; “if they wanted men why did not they draft men and not money[?]”39
Groups of potential draftees also eagerly sought out substitutes. In May 1862, with speculation that a draft was on the horizon, Middletown, Rhode Island, men made plans to head off conscription. Sarah E. Fales kept her son in the First Rhode Island Volunteers apprised of their efforts. “[S]ome of the men have be[e]n terribly frightened” by the prospects of being drafted. “[T]hey met at the townhouse again last week not to raise recruits but to raise money to hire men to go for thim [sic] . . . Father says there will be no drafting as long as there is a dollar left in the town, what do you think of that for patriotism and love of country[?]”40 The quest for substitutes, with ever-intensifying competition among Northern communities and, thus, ever-increasing cost for able-bodied men, continued through the last year of the war. Again, this option provided those men who wished to avoid service a way out of the draft; indeed, of the almost 232,000 men selected in the lotteries, more men caught in the relatively low yield of the various calls furnished substitutes than were actually drafted into the army. Over 28,000 provided substitutes as opposed to the over 26,000 men who were drafted into the service.41 Jacob Philster, a Cincinnati businessman, understood the role played by self-interest and in January 1863 urged Senator John Sherman to attend to it. He warned Sherman that whatever the government did with conscription, it had to continue to appeal to the two sides of Northern nature, “patriotism and cupidity”; just be sure to encourage bounty payments and to allow commutation, he advised.42
There were a number of reasons why Northerners could support conscription even if it proved to be a burden to part of the population. Some of them found patriotic virtue in conscription, as it was a means by which citizens could pay the debt they owed to a nation that had given them an environment of liberty. Other Northerners accepted the draft, believing that it could be a good way to spread the burden of service beyond the ranks of the poorer members of society. Some Republicans feared that conscription was the only way for their party to maintain political power as so many of them volunteered while less enthusiastic Democratic voters stayed at home.43 There were, however, many Northerners who found drafting men into the army obnoxious and did their best to avoid conscription. Upward to 50,000 men probably illegally dodged conscription before the 1863 federal draft, and 161,244 men illegally avoided the subsequent federal drafts.44
There was no mystery as to why they pursued such action, according to Philster. “The Draft fix it as you will is distasteful to the American mind,” Philster reminded Senator Sherman. It was simple, he continued, explaining, “we don’t like the use of arbitrary power, and our republican education make[s] us resent it naturally, and disapprove of its use except in cases of last resort, as the Rebellion.”45 Even as a last resort there were Northerners who objected to conscription, finding philosophical and political fault with the practice. Understandably, pacifists, who opposed the war from the outset, quarreled with the notion of forced military service, used moral suasion to try to convince society to stop the violence, and provided information to potential conscripts who wished to avoid service.46 Other Northerners believed that conscription was an extraordinary and unconstitutional act, with commutation fees and substitutes favoring those citizens who had money, while leaving their poorer constituents at a disadvantage. Businessmen and farmers in need of labor would suffer, politicians protested, as would the poorer families of the men called to service. Democrats also viewed the draft as an unprecedented burden imposed by the federal government, circumventing the states’ role in raising troops as well as abridging the personal liberties of the men conscripted. One Dubuque, Iowa, editor labeled the draft unconstitutional, an act of despotism and “military slavery.”47 Julius Wesslau, a German immigrant residing in New York City, agreed. He complained about the 1862 militia draft, explaining, “[I]f I was unwilling to be treated like a piece of government property in Prussia, I am just as unwilling to do so here.”48
The Democratic Party, as the loyal opposition, accepted conscription as law, but antidraft individuals were less likely to go along with it, even to the point of resorting to violence.49 Direct opposition to the draft assumed various forms. In August 1862, in Dubuque, Iowa, some dissenters took preemptive action and left their homes in the Irish neighborhoods when they became concerned with the possibilities of a draft.50 During 1862, in Pennsylvania, there were more signs of the tension that a widespread draft might promote. In mining areas dominated by Democrats and Irish immigrants, men refused to cooperate with the process, hid from officials, and sometimes threatened government officials.51 The problems in the mining communities of Pennsylvania endured into 1865. People there continued to give shelter to draft dodgers and deserters, while doing violence to federal agents, the very men who were supposed to conduct the draft.52 In 1862, in Brown County, Wisconsin, armed Belgian farmers threatened Senator Timothy Howe in Green Bay, but the senator escaped the mob.53 Elsewhere in Wisconsin the German and the Luxemburg Catholic populations rose up against conscription, most significantly in Port Washington, where resisters, their courage fueled with liquor, seized conscription records, ran officials out of town, and destroyed the houses of men involved with executing the draft. The army intervened and arrested many of the offenders, who in the end avoided punishment. 54
Federal officers encountered resistance as they went to the homes of eligible men to sign them up for the coming draft. In June in Chicago, enrollment officials confronted snarling dogs and angry wives and suffered the indignities of having chamberpot waste tossed on them from second-floor windows; officials encountered the worst inhospitable acts the city had to offer in the poor Irish neighborhoods. Clever Chicagoans, if tapped for service, went “slinking off. . . like whipped curs” for the proximate safety of Canada or, as many of the travelers said, “to see their Canadian uncles and aunts.”55
In June hundreds of troops accompanied by artillery put down a protest in Holmes County, Ohio, while in Indiana, draft resisters killed two enrollment officers.56 But it was the actual federal draft of 1863 that provoked resistance and violence throughout the North, most famously in New York City where protestors ran riot through parts of the city. From July 13 through July 16, a mob, primarily from the city’s Irish working class who resented the economics of the war as well as the new federal war aim of emancipation, destroyed property, razed a black orphanage, and committed mayhem and murder. “These people committed every atrocity imaginable,” complained Karl Wesslau, “for three nights in a row the city was lit up by the burning buildings.” Furthermore, Wesslau continued, “Everyone thought the government here was really spineless, and the parties attacked it and made fun of it.”57 At least 105 and perhaps 150 individuals lost their lives in the riot, including soldiers shot or brutally beaten by the mob and one black man who committed suicide lest he fall into the hands of the rioters; property damage amounted to millions of dollars of claims.58 Poor New Yorkers raised themselves up in violent protest, but according to Sidney Fisher, it was the Democrats' “incendiary harangues” that “have inflamed the people and given to the rabble a pretext for disorder.” Fisher was not one for allowing freedom of speech in dangerous times, and now here was more proof of the treasonous intentions of “These demagogues” who “are determined to cause anarchy in the North, if they can, in order to serve the South.”59
The New York riot in particular frightened many Northern communities worried that they would have to suffer similar events when it came time to draft men. Some communities experienced violence, but quelled the disturbances quickly. In Boston, on July 14, Governor John Andrew’s quick response with troops supplemented with patriotic Harvard alumni who were in town attending their reunion at a local hotel kept things under control, as did calls for quiet by local politicians and priests.60
Other communities experienced unfounded panic. In Northampton, Massachusetts, the home folk were fearful of violence in late July because rumor had it that conscription would provoke an outbreak of aggressive resistance. “[T]he old grannies run up & down the street saying there was surely going to be trouble doing just the thing to create a disturbance,” one veteran soldier wrote, apparently tickled by what he considered to be the comical response to the violence in New York City. Watching the home guard patrol the streets “was fun & I enjoyed it.” The men of the guard had pledged to “fight to the death,” but to save them the trouble he and two companions gathered up and secreted their weapons to keep them from hurting anyone. He assured his correspondent that “no resistance will be made by the conscripts to reporting when ordered in this section” because most of the men called up will “be exempted for disability or pay their mony [sic].”61
The experience of the resisters in the Pennsylvania districts and elsewhere, however, indicated that opposition to the draft was no laughing matter in many communities and frequently a much more complicated affair than the rejection of forced military service. Working men, and especially German and Irish Catholic immigrants, in Northeastern cities, Vermont quarries, Pennsylvania mines, and the Old Northwest states who tended to vote Democratic believed that conscription was just one more unfair burden from the Lincoln administration, conflating the draft with such government policies as emancipation, their own economic difficulties, and labor problems. They resented the war, fearing that it favored the interests of the wealthy, the war profiteers, and blacks over their own. New York City rioters, for example, worried that if they were drafted black men would displace them in the workforce. The Pennsylvania miners had been very much engaged in labor protests for the usual reasons found among workers who tried to unionize throughout American history.62 In Iowa, the draft opponents who organized the Independent Military Company of Mounted Riflemen in July 1863 had already been involved in tax protests and probably had been voicing their objections to the war from a much earlier date.63 And residents of Holmes County, Ohio, believed they were defending their local liberty from the encroachments of the Lincoln administration's expanding, intrusive central government.64
Significantly, resistance to the draft in these and other places was not simply an individual affair, but rather an expression of the values of entire communities. Northern communities throughout the region, including their leading men, had learned the particulars of legal draft avoidance from the first threat of conscription.65 But even where extralegal or illegal resistance materialized, it did so usually with the support of families and neighbors.66 From late 1864 into the fall of 1865, military forces arrested 2,810 deserters and 3,743 draft evaders in the eastern Pennsylvania mountains. The military received some assistance from local Unionists in this effort, but such numbers could not have existed without significant community support for the dissenters.67
Federal authorities, either openly or undercover usually within the Provost Marshal General Bureau, tracked down and dragged into court deserters, dodgers, and those citizens who aided them.68 In New Jersey, 37 individuals over the course of the war were convicted of such crimes.69 But in some communities, sympathetic jurists helped the defendants brought into their courts. In Iowa, on one occasion in July 1863, two resisters ended up in prison only to be freed by the county judge when he signed a writ of habeas corpus. They in turn filed kidnapping charges against the assistant provost marshal general and the men who had aided him in making their arrest.70
There were many reasons to complain about Republican policies as far as Democrats were concerned. Conscription, however, aggravated antigovernment dissent, making it more vociferous and more violent, thus encouraging like reactions from those policy makers they criticized. Not only did conscription threaten to undermine individual choice, it also represented an extension of federal power throughout the Northern states in ways that emancipation, another problematic unconstitutional act, or taxation, another example of government overreach, did not.71
The conflict caused by the federal government’s draft, however, was also part of the larger national problem of dealing with dissent and freedom of speech in a democratic nation during a time of crisis. Republican politicians and Union generals tried to tamp down opposition in the troublesome regions, but even within the federal government concern for disloyalty meant administering oaths of loyalty and a continued suspicion of concealed prorebel sympathies in the various nooks and crannies of the government. Any division, Northern Unionists believed, “weakened the efforts of the government.” For Sidney Fisher, who pondered such things in August 1861, even a peace party made up of Democrats “is really an alliance with the rebels of the South and playing into their hands.”72
At the beginning of the war, officials fearful about treasonous sentiments within the government meant having all employees of the federal government in Washington and elsewhere take an oath of future loyalty if they wished to keep their jobs. These employees still had to be careful with their speech and concerned about the difficulties outspoken family members could cause them. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair checked on loyalty within his department, ridding it of those individuals who did not measure up to his scrutiny. Secretary of the Interior Caleb Smith reviewed pension records and deprived individuals of their coming payments if they or a family member had spoken out in any suggestive disloyal way. A congressional committee investigated charges of disloyalty shielding informers from defendants; by the end of 1861, the committee claimed to have discovered over 300 disloyal government workers in various Washington departments.73
From the first days of the war, the federal government wished either to censor publications that supposedly undermined the security of the nation or use such information to identify disloyal civilians. Postmasters confiscated letters addressed to individuals within the seceded states and sent them to Secretary of State William Seward, who oversaw problems of disloyalty early in the war.74 In August 1861, the government arrested Pierce Butler, a Philadelphia resident with Southern connections, for corresponding with secessionists. Sidney Fisher, however, believed it was because “He has expressed . . . the strongest opinions in favor of the Southern cause and wishes for its success in earnest language.” It was understandable, Fisher concluded, and justifiable, rationalizing “in times such as these that alone is sufficient to justify his arrest.”75
The government also tried to control the flow of information beyond personal letters. The Post Office excluded from the mails what it determined were treasonable newspapers, and the government actually closed papers it deemed disloyal or disruptive to the war effort. In August 1862, P. Gray Meek, the recently mobbed antiwar editor of the Centre County, Pennsylvania, Bellefonte Democratic Watchman, was dogged by a warrant accusing him of “inducing men not to enlist in the army.” A friend felt obligated to remind the community that this charge was nothing but character assassination. Furthermore, he cautioned, “Remember, this is a free country; and so long as a man is guiltless of treason . . . he has a right to the free expression of his opinion.”76 In September 1862, however, Lincoln proclaimed such antiwar actions, along with draft resistance, unlawful.77 Unionists approved of such measures believing Democratic newspapers as well as antiwar speeches gave comfort to the enemy. They suggested to Confederates that the North was divided in its war efforts, according to Philadelphian Sidney Fisher, and they “thus encourage the enemy to preserver [sic].” After living through two years of war, he concluded in 1863, the Confederacy had benefited a great deal from Democratic dissent, “for the hopes inspired by speeches, newspapers and notes of northern Democrats, the rebellion would have been quelled long ere this.”78
Shutting down a newspaper, especially in heavily Democratic areas, however, could backfire. In early June 1863, General Ambrose Burnside closed the Chicago Times, a vigorously anti-Lincoln paper, whose editor Wilbur Storey was given to scurrilous ad hominem attacks on the president, a man he labeled “so foolish an old joker.” The military action provided further opportunity for Storey to attack Lincoln and Burnside, whom he now dubbed “The Beast of Fredericksburg,” a reference to the slaughter his army experienced in that battle. The popular reaction threatened an outbreak of violence. Handbills rallied thousands of supporters to the streets “to resent this military interference with freedom of the press.” They faced off with Republicans. Lincoln asked Burnside to lift his order, and eventually the crisis passed.79
Beyond making disloyal statements, newspapers regardless of party affiliation gave away too much information about the Union army, its strengths, and its movements to their readers and thus to the enemy, a problem with which the government and the military struggled until the army had much more good news than bad to share with Northern readers.80 Such restrictions required supervising the flow of information over the North’s telegraph lines, something the president could do with the authority granted him by Congress in January 1862.81 During the war the Associated Press (AP), already the principal wire service before the war, gained a virtual monopoly of war news spread by the telegraph thanks to a special arrangement with the federal government. In 1862 the War Department imposed censorship on the telegraph to prevent reporters from sending information that might compromise military matters while it also fed exclusive news from Washington to AP reporters. Major newspapers with correspondents in Washington had the means to get their words out, but papers relying on AP reporters received information from the capital with a decidedly proadministration and pro-Republican slant.82
Concerns over the destructive consequences of dissent also prompted the Lincoln administration to suspend the writ of habeas corpus at various times during the war. This procedure allowed the government to imprison individuals without formally charging them at a time when Lincoln’s administration broadly defined disloyal speech. In March 1863, Congress reinforced the president’s claim to executive authority when it passed the Habeas Corpus Act authorizing him to suspend the writ when he believed “the public safety may require it.”83 Republicans believed using such tactics was essential in times of war. Constitutional niceties were for after the fighting stopped. This view became particularly powerful in the minds of people such as Connecticut’s Horace Bushnell, who equated morality with loyalty to the Union cause. For Bushnell, it was better to “fight our nation’s enemies and destroyers.” Once victorious, he reasoned, “then if we can, it will be the time to mend the abuses of the laws.”84
The most famous of antiwar dissidents subjected to harsh treatment at the hands of the Lincoln government was Ohio politician Clement Vallandigham. Vallandigham, a Peace Democrat, ran afoul of General Ambrose Burnside’s April 1863 order that broadly defined treasonous speech. Burnside, commander of the Department of Ohio consisting of the loyal slave state of Kentucky and the free Midwestern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, deemed it his duty to stamp out dissent within his jurisdiction. On May 1, 1863, the politician tempted the government with an oration at Mt. Vernon, Ohio, highly critical of the government’s war aims and its threats to the Constitution. Vallandigham’s chief complaints were not new, but echoed old oppositional grievances concerning emancipation and conscription wrapped in his claim to constitutional rights of free speech, one that no arbitrary military order could undermine. In the end, he warned the crowd that the government would soon enforce conscription in order to conduct not a war for the Union, but “a wicked Abolition war, and that if those in authority were allowed to accomplish their purpose, the people would be deprived of their liberties, and a monarchy established.”85
Vallandigham was arrested and imprisoned, charged with treason, tried and convicted by a military commission, and exiled to the Confederacy, even though he urged voters to work within the political system to change the country’s course. The Lincoln administration, far from quieting dissent with its attack on Vallandigham, provoked criticism that made the Democratic politician into a martyr at the hands of “this wild storm of fanaticism,” as one Iowa editorialist called Republican policy. Democratic politicians organized rallies in defense of Vallandigham and questioned whether the Republican Party’s true purpose in conducting the war was to undermine the liberties of the Northern people.86
Republicans tended to paint opposition to the Union cause with the blackest brush possible, but they did witness some events during the war that appeared to justify their anxieties. From the beginning of the war, some Midwesterners discussed establishing a confederacy of the states of the old Northwest Territory. Confederate agents made contact with sympathetic Midwesterners, and members of the Sons of Liberty in Illinois were receiving financial assistance from them. Sons of Liberty in Indiana had hidden a cache of arms, which was discovered when they were arrested. And there was an incompetently planned effort to free Confederate prisoners of war from Camp Douglas in Chicago. The latter conspiracy, its dangers exaggerated by the local press, led to the arrests in early November 1864 of 150 people, most of whom were not guilty of treasonous activity. An editorialist for the Chicago Tribune stoked enthusiasm for Republican politicians as he anxiously explained that the affair gave loyal people what “the Northern allies of rebellion are capable of.” The people of Chicago “have had a glimpse,” he continued, “of the reality which awaits them if these sympathizers with treason can once clutch the reins of government.” In the end, the Chicago conspiracy arrests, if they did not actually improve the security of the city, provided an electoral boost to Lincoln and his party in the presidential election on November 8.87