From the Big Black River in Mississippi, Sherman was writing to Lincoln: "The South must be ruled by us, or she will rule us. We must conquer them, or ourselves be conquered. They ask, and will have, nothing else, and talk of compromise is bosh; for we know they would even scorn the offer ... I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it . . . The people of this country in after-years will be better citizens from the dear-bought experience of the present crisis. Let them learn it now, and learn it well, that good citizens must obey as well as command.”
A fierce insolence would Vallandigham, Seymour, the organization Democrats, have found in this treatise if Sherman had let it be published as Lincoln proposed. “I know what I say when I repeat that the insurgents of the South sneer at all overtures looking to their interests . . . They tell me to my face that they respect Grant, McPherson, and our brave associates who fight manfully and well for a principle, but despise the Copperheads and sneaks at the North, who profess friendship for the South and opposition to the war, as mere covers for their knavery and poltroonery.”
Sherman invoked his doctrine of terror: “Our officers, marshals, and courts, must penetrate into the innermost recesses of their land, . . . that it makes no difference whether it be in one year, or two, or ten, or twenty; that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, every thing that to us seems proper; that we will not cease till the end is attained . . .”
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When the vaguely furtive and definitely garrulous James R. Gilmore of the New York Tribune came again with a scheme, Lincoln listened. It was doubtful whether Lincoln gave Gilmore a glad hand and took him to his bosom in the easy and familiar way Gilmore wrote about it. Yet it seemed definite that Gilmore and others in the summer of ’63 interested Lincoln, at least mildly and tentatively, in plans to sound out Zebulon B. Vance, the 33-year-old governor of North Carolina, on how far Vance might be willing to go toward bringing his state back into the Union.
The break between Vance and the Davis Government ran deep, the feeling bitter. The planter aristocracy, the slaveholders, the original secessionists, had no such hold in North Carolina as in the Cotton States. Her mountaineers, farmers, seacoast population, were “different. Vance spoke for his people when he served notice on the Richmond Government that his state troops would go into action against Confederate authorities who should try to override the right of any citizen to the writ of habeas corpus. Vance protested to Richmond against Confederate War Department officers “engaging in speculations of private account” in North Carolina. Vance telegraphed and wrote Davis that a Georgia regiment, its men and officers, started a riot the night of September 9, burned and destroyed the Raleigh Standard, and in retaliation a mob of citizens the next morning burned and destroyed the Raleigh State Journal. “I feel very sad in the contemplation of these outrages,” Vance told Davis. “The distance is quite short to either anarchy or despotism, when armed soldiers, led by their officers, can with impunity outrage the laws of a State.”
The Georgia regiment that had wrecked and burned the Raleigh Standard newspaper plant hated its peace tone, hated a four-column address published July 31, 1863. Governor Vance had helped, it was said, to write the address with its cry, “The great demand of the people of this part of the State is peace ; peace upon any terms that will not enslave and degrade us.”
Vance would welcome reunion of the states and “any peace compatible with honor,” according to the information Gilmore brought Lincoln. He had it, he said, from Edward Kidder, a merchant of Wilmington, North Carolina. Born in New Hampshire, Kidder had gone to Wilmington in 1826 when he was 21, had lived there ever since, “accumulating a vast fortune, and having larger business transactions than any other man in the State.” Lincoln read Kidder’s confidential report of a talk with Governor Vance. Slavery was dead, the report ran, the Confederacy hopeless, and Vance favored a return to the Union on terms of honor and equity. Therefore Kidder hoped Gilmore would run the blockade into Wilmington, interview Governor Vance at Kidder’s home, bringing to Vance Lincoln’s peace terms.
In the months that followed, with further errands and with the plans changing, nothing much directly came of the scheme. Whether Lincoln reached across the state lines and convinced Governor Vance that peace efforts would be worth while was not clear. It was clear as daylight, however, that a few months after Gilmore and Kidder had laid their plans before Lincoln, Governor Vance was going nearly as far as Lincoln could wish in blunt suggestions and arguments sent to Jefferson Davis. A letter of Vance to Davis in December ’63 was a straight and open plea for “some effort at negotiation with the enemy.”
There was a Union sentiment in North Carolina, as in several areas of the South—as in one county in Alabama having no slaves and sending no troops to the Confederate armies. Lincoln was responsive to all such Union areas. What he did in some cases might never be known. In many affairs he was careful to keep no record.
The French government advised the American Minister in Paris that the sooner the American government showed a willingness to recognize the government of Archduke Maximilian, set up in Mexico by French armies, the sooner would those armies be ready to leave Mexico. Seward replied that the determination of the President was to err on the side of neutrality, if he erred at all, as between France and Mexico.
In plainer words than the covert phrasings of diplomacy, Lincoln had answered General John M. Thayer’s query, “Mr. President, how about the French army in Mexico?” He shrugged his shoulders and wrinkled his eyebrows. “I’m not exactly ‘skeered,’ but I don’t like the looks of the thing. Napoleon has taken advantage of our weakness in our time of trouble, and has attempted to found a monarchy on the soil of Mexico in utter disregard of the Monroe doctrine. My policy is, attend to only one trouble at a time. If we get well out of our present difficulties and restore the Union, I propose to notify Louis Napoleon that it is about time to take his army out of Mexico. When that army is gone, the Mexicans will take care of Maximilian.”
Heading the Military Department of Missouri was General John M. Schofield, 32 years old, cool, sober, a West Pointer, professor of physics, chief of staff for General Lyon in the fighting at Wilson’s Creek. Now he was Lincoln’s main buffer in a Slave State seething with civil war. To the President, he reported the return of thousands of soldiers from defeated Confederate armies at Vicksburg and elsewhere. At first organized secretly as gangs, they joined up into regiments and small armies; they had raided, foraged supplies from Unionists, stolen money and horses, burned houses and railroad bridges,
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looted villages and towns, shot and hanged Union men. Toward keeping order Schofield organized ten regiments of Federal troops. Once he estimated there were 5,000 armed and banded guerrillas in Missouri.
Schofield’s authority often tangled with that of Missouri’s provisional governor, 65-year-old Hamilton Rowan Gamble. Virginia-born of Irish immigrants, his wife from South Carolina, Gamble had been member of the legislature, secretary of state, presiding judge of the state supreme court. He had pronounced Lincoln’s call for troops in April ’61 unconstitutional and had leaned toward those who wished to make Missouri independent of both North and South, repelling invaders whether in blue or in gray. As chairman of the committee on Federal relations in the state constitutional convention of’61, Gamble hoped for “amicable adjustment” without civil war. That same convention appointed him provisional governor of the state, replacing the regularly elected Claiborne F. Jackson, whom Unionist forces had run out of the state capital.
Gamble wrote that the radicals were “openly and loudly” threatening to overthrow the state provisional government by violence. Lincoln replied that Schofield would take care of the violence, that it was not a party but individual radicals making the threats. “I have seen no occasion to make a distinction against the provisional government because of its not having been chosen and inaugurated in the usual way. Nor have I seen any cause to suspect it of unfaithfulness to the Union.”
Yet Lincoln knew that the face of Gamble was toward the past, that the emancipation ordinance passed by the conservative convention in the summer of’63 was evasive, odorous of politics, setting the year 1870 for slavery to “cease” in Missouri, but to “cease” under the peculiar conditions that all slaves over 40 would still be slaves till they died, while all slaves under 12 would be slaves until they were 23, and those ol all other ages until the Fourth of July, 1876. In the atmosphere of the convention that passed this ordinance Governor Gamble felt called on to offer his resignation, but it was refused by a vote of 51 to 29.
A delegation of German radicals from Missouri called at the White House and later published their report that the President had refused their demands for dismissal of Seward, Blair and Halleck, had declined their requests that he restore Fremont, Sigel and Butler to important commands.
In Missouri excitement flared high as the radical Union Emancipation convention met, with delegates from four-fifths of the counties of the state. The high cry in Jefferson City September 1 was that Governor Gamble’s “pro- slavery" provisional government was paralyzing Federal power. A Committee of Seventy, one from each county in the state, was appointed to call on the President and lay their cause before him. At train stops on the way to
Washington this committee was hailed by brass bands, antislavery delegations and orators. At Washington they were joined by a Committee of Eighteen from Kansas on the same errand.
Lincoln told Hay that if they could show that Schofield had done anything wrong, their case was made, that he believed they were against Schofield because Schofield would not take sides with them. “I think I understand this matter perfectly and I cannot do anything contrary to my convictions, to please these men, earnest and powerful as they may be.” Meanwhile the Missouri-Kansas committees dominated the Washington scene, took in a big reception to themselves at the Union League Hall, where Gamble was denounced and immediate emancipation demanded.
The delegation took two days to prepare an address to the President. The wrongs their people had borne were heavy. Crimes and outrages they alleged and enumerated for Lincoln’s eye. They were exasperated men whose voices rose out of mixed motives or war and politics; public service and private revenge; the hangover of greed and corruption among Lremont’s associates, of connivance and trickery by the Blairs in their animosities toward Lremont and others, of anger that Schofield had lent detachments of Enrolled Militia to Grant for the Vicksburg operation, of wrath that Lincoln and members of Congress were trying to emancipate the slaves of Missouri by gradual purchase instead of direct bestowal of freedom by proclamation, of indignation at Schofield’s Order No. 92 prohibiting Kansans from pursuing guerrillas over the state line, of disgruntlement on the part of some with the apportionment of Lederal offices and favors, of suspicion on the part of others that Lincoln’s policy was Kentuckian and his leanings proslavery.
Their prepared address to the President voiced three demands. Lirst, General Schofield must be relieved, and General Butler appointed in his stead. Second, the system of Enrolled Militia in Missouri must be broken up and national forces substituted. Third, at elections persons must not be allowed to vote who were not entitled by law to do so.
At nine o’clock the morning of September 30, the 88 delegates walked through the great front doors into the White House. Then the great front doors were locked and stayed locked till the conference was over. At the committees’ own request, all reporters and spectators were barred.
Lincoln looked along panels of faces. His eyes roved over stubborn men, in the main sincere, some with a genius of courage and sacrifice. He told John Hay later: “They are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally. They are utterly lawless—the onhandiest devils in the world to deal with—but after all, their faces are set Zionwards.”
The address was read to the President by the chairman, Charles Daniel Drake, a St. Louis lawyer, 52 years old, educated as a midshipman in the U.S. Navy, author of notable law treatises, member of the Missouri Legislature, an early leader against secession. His voice carried what Enos Clarke, another St. Louis delegate, described as “a deep, impressive, stentorian tone." And Enos Clarke took note that while Chairman Drake read, the President listened with patient attention, and when the reading was over rose slowly, and with a deliberation born of what they knew not, began a lengthy reply. Said Clarke: “I shall never forget the intense chagrin and disappointment we all felt at the treatment of the matter in the beginning of his reply . . . He gave us the impression of a pettifogger speaking before a justice of the peace jury. But as he talked on and made searching inquiries of members of the delegation and invited debate, it became manifest that his manner at the beginning was really the foil of a master ...”
Enos Clarke recalled Lincoln saying: “You gentlemen must bear in mind that in performing the duties of the office I hold I must represent no one section, but I must act for all sections of the Union in trying to maintain the supremacy of the Government.” This from Lincoln had been heard over and again privately, publicly, in letters and speeches. Clarke, however, caught another expression that could not have been anticipated. “I desire to so conduct the affairs of this administration that if, at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.”
Two hours ran on, some of it in speechmaking, some in random talk. Hay noted the President saying he could not give a hasty answer. “I will take your address, carefully consider it, and respond at my earliest convenience ...” As President, he had uniformly refused to give the governor exclusive control of the Missouri State Militia, while on the other hand the Enrolled Militia existed solely under state laws with which he had no right to interfere. As to Schofield, Lincoln was sorry they had not made specific complaints. “I cannot act on vague impressions.” He went into details as to Schofields record. “I know nothing to his disadvantage. I am not personally acquainted with him. I have with him no personal relations. If you will allege a definite wrong-doing, and, having clearly made your point, prove it, I shall remove him.” The suspension of habeas corpus by Schofield in Missouri was in obedience to the President’s official decree. “You object to its being used in Missouri. In other words, that which is right when employed against opponents is wrong when employed against yourselves. Still, I will consider that.”
1 hey objected to Schofield’s muzzling the press. “As to that,” continued Lincoln, “I think when an officer in any department finds that a newspaper
is pursuing a course calculated to embarrass his operations and stir up sedition and tumult, he has the right to lay hands upon it and suppress ir, but in no other case. I approved the order in question after the ‘Missouri Democrat’ had also approved it.” A delegate interrupted: “We thought it was to be used against the other side.’ And Lincoln agreed, “Certainly you did. Your ideas of justice seem to depend on the application of it.”
Hay noted that as an inquisition the morning did not work out, Lincoln meeting each point, issue, grievance, “with a quick counter-statement so brief and clinching that the several volunteer spokesmen who came forward to support the main address retired, one by one, disconcerted and overwhelmed.” 1 he formal session drew to a close with Lincoln saying: “Still you appear to come before me as my friends, if I agree with you, and not otherwise. I do not here speak of mere personal friendship. When I speak of my friends I mean those who are friendly to my measures, to the policy of the Government.” They knew the President was referring to loyal Union men who might even be proslavery in viewpoint when he said: “If a man votes for supplies of men and money, encourages enlistments, discourages desertions, does all in his power to carry the war on to a successful issue, I have no right to question him for his abstract political opinions. I must make a dividing line somewhere between those who are opponents of the Government, and those who only approve peculiar features of my Administration while they sustain the Government.”
One of the men from Missouri felt Lincoln was not so quick in his answers, not so much at ease as Hay believed. “The President in the course of his reply hesitated a great deal,” said this man, “and was manifestly, as he said, very much troubled over affairs in Missouri. He said they were a source of more anxiety to him than we could imagine. He regretted that some of the men who had founded the Republican party should now be arrayed apparently against his administration.” Twice before, the Missourian had met Lincoln, and had not seen such a perplexed look on Lincoln’s face. “When he said he was bothered about this thing he showed it. He spoke kindly, yet now and then there was a little rasping tone in his voice that seemed to say, ‘You men ought to fix this thing up without tormenting me.’ But he never lost his temper.”
When all points had been covered, and there seemed nothing more to say, Chairman Drake stepped forward. “Mr. President, the time has now come when we can no longer trespass upon your attention but must take leave of you.” Then came the most impressive moment of the two hours, Drake saying the men who stood before the President now would return, many of them to homes surrounded by “rebel” sentiment. “Many of them, sir, in returning there do so at the risk of their lives, and if any of those lives are sacrificed by reason of the military administration of this government, let me tell you, sir,
that their blood will be upon your garments and not upon ours.” This was terribly, though only partly, true and near to ghastly prophecy. Enos Clarke noted that during this address of Drake “the President stood before the delegation with tears streaming down his cheeks, seeming deeply agitated.”
One by one the delegates shook hands with the President and took leave. To Clarke it was memorable; he shook hands, walked off with others, and at the door turned for a final look. “Mr. Lincoln had met some personal acquaintances with whom he was exchanging pleasantries, and instead of the tears of a few moments before, he was indulging in hearty laughter. This rapid and wonderful transition from one extreme to the other impressed me greatly.”
The next night Secretary Chase opened his home and gave the delegation a reception, told them he was heartily in sympathy with their mission. On to New York went the delegates to a rousing public meeting in Cooper Union, where William Cullen Bryant spoke for them, where the President was threatened with revolutionary action if he did not yield to their demands.
As in other cases, Lincoln now stood by his men. In a long letter October 5 to the Missouri-Kansas Committee he said that in their address of September 30, besides four supplementary ones on October 3, enough of “suffering and wrong” was stated.
Yet the whole case, as presented, fails to convince me, that Gen. Schofield, or the Enrolled Militia, is responsible for that suffering and wrong . . . We are in civil war. In such cases there always is a main question; but in this case that question is a perplexing compound—Union and Slavery. It thus becomes a question not of two sides merely, but of at least four sides, even among those who are for the Union, saying nothing of those who are against it. Thus, those who are for the Union with , but not without slavery—those for it without, but not with —those for it with or without, but prefer it with —and those for it with or without , but prefer it without. Among these again, is a subdivision of those who are for gradual but not for immediate, and those who are for immediate, but not for gradual extinction of slavery. It is easy to conceive that all these shades of opinion, and even more, may be sincerely entertained by honest and truthful men. Yet, all being for the Union, by reason of these differences, each will prefer a different way of sustaining the Union. At once sincerity is questioned, and motives are assailed. Actual war coming, blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this, as before said, may be among honest men only. But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confhsion. Strong measures, deemed indispensable but harsh at best, such men make worse by mal-administration. Murders for old grudges, and murders for pelf, proceed under any cloak that will best cover for the occasion.
Finally, he had directed General Schofield that the request of the committee regarding elections was proper. The third demand of the Committee of Seventy was granted.
In his own serious advice to Schofield, Lincoln made it plain he had no immediate hope of peace for that region. In the young, blond, whiskered Schofield had been found an administrator who understood Lincoln once writing to him: “If both factions, or neither, shall abuse you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one, and praised by the other.”
What to do about the Negro and slavery in this Slave State was covered in three sentences to Schofield: “Allow no part of the Military under your command, to be engaged in either returning fugitive slaves, or in forcing, or enticing slaves from their homes; and, so far as practicable, enforce the same forbearance upon the people . . . Allow no one to enlist colored troops, except upon orders from you, or from here through you. Allow no one to assume the functions of confiscating property, under the law of congress, or other wise, except upon orders from here.”
A deepening trend was seen in the Cincinnati Telegraph and Advocate, under auspices of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cincinnati, in July advising its readers that Negro slavery was virtually abolished; it would oppose on moral and religious grounds all efforts to restore or re-establish it.
The new governor of Kentucky, Thomas E. Bramlette, in his September inaugural spoke against the arming of Negroes; he asked what could be done with such soldiers at the end of the war. He was speaking for those of his Slave State who knew that such soldiers would bring grave problems.
A vision was coming to many that somehow amid the confusions of emancipation proclamations, enforced conscription, habeas corpus, there belonged in the picture many regiments of black men fighting for whatever the war was about. “I want to see 200,000 black soldiers in the field,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr.—no radical—wrote to his father, “and then I shall think it time to have peace.” From the South now, since Gettysburg and Vicksburg, came less emphasis on the right of secession and the cry more often that the South was in a defensive war.
Habits of stealing and lying changed for the better when freed Negroes came into the contraband camps. So alleged the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, headed by Robert Dale Owen, in their report published in June ’63, saying, “. . . one of the first acts of the Negroes, when they found themselves free, was to establish schools at their own expense.” The former crime of learning to read being no longer a crime, made some of them glad. They were starting churches. Also now that they could be married and have
a family life if they chose, some were taking that course. “The Negro is found quite ready to copy whatever he believes are the rights and obligations of what he looks up to as the superior race.”
The pathos of mixed bloods, and the fact of a mulatto woman being in more peril from a Northern white soldier than from a black freedman, was recited by the commission. “Many colored women think it more disgraceful to be black than to be illegitimate; for it is especially in regard to white men that their ideas and habits as to this matter are perverted. A case came to the knowledge of the commission, in which a mulatto girl deemed it beneath her to associate with her half sister, a black, the daughter of her mother’s husband, her own father being a white man.” The commission inserted in its report sentences over which Lincoln, possibly, both laughed and cried as he read: “. . . Our Chief Magistrate would probably be surprised to learn with what reverence, bordering on superstition, he is regarded by these poor people. Recently, at Beaufort, a gang of colored men ... at work on the wharf, were discussing the qualifications of the President—how he had dispersed their masters, and what he would undoubtedly do hereafter for the colored race— when an aged, white-headed Negro—a praise-man’ (as the phrase is) amongst them—with all the solemnity of an old prophet, broke forth: ‘ What do you know ’bout Massa Linkum? Massa Linkum be ebrywhere. He walk de earth like de Lord r .’”
CHAPTER XXI