Glory Road (38 page)

To him, a day or so later, came a puzzled War Department officer bearing a verbal message from the President. Mr. Lincoln, this officer told McClure, was of course anxious to see the law executed, or —Mr. Lincoln had emphasized this point—at least appear to have been executed. What the President was talking about this officer did not know, but he said that Mr. Lincoln had added: "I think McClure will understand."

McClure did—the ways of Pennsylvania politics bring to a man a breadth of understanding at an early age, and McClure had been at it for a long time—and he went into a huddle with Governor Curtin and Bannan. McClure remembered that there had been enrollment districts which had been able to prove that their quotas were already filled by showing that numbers of their people had enlisted in other cities and hence had not been counted properly. Bannan, who was warning that the draft could not be executed in his region without a bloody fight, slipped away quietly. He returned next day with a big stack of affidavits showing that any number of Schuylkill residents had in fact joined the army in places like Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and where not. McClure solemnly inspected them, agreed that the draft quota had indeed been filled, and revoked the call for conscripts. There was a truce, and the law at least appeared to have been executed.
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A bit later the same dodge was worked in reverse. Philadelphia was the great Republican stronghold, and Washington's figures showed that Philadelphia that spring was shy of its quota by three thousand men. McClure got busy again. (He commented long afterward that "there were experienced lightning calculators in those days.") Many persons from other parts of the state had enlisted in Philadelphia and had been properly credited to their own districts. A magic hand passed over the figures, and it immediately became evident that at least three thousand of these men were in fact Phila-delphians. This brought no more troops to the Army of the Potomac, but it at least kept the Republicans from losing Philadelphia, which had seemed to be imminent, and all was well.
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Philadelphia was symptomatic. There was infinite bewilderment in the land. The beloved Union for which men were dying was, after all, an abstraction, and the Negro, for whom deaths were also being recorded, was an utter social outcast, looked upon in the North with very little more friendship than in the South. From New York to the Mississippi River the average Northern worker had an uneasy fear that emancipation would bring a great horde of low-wage Negroes into the North, to take away the jobs and livelihood of honest white men. Times were not easy. An inflationary boom was on, and prices were going up faster than incomes. This came on top of older troubles which had been building up in America for years.

Here was a land of freedom and plenty, and somehow it had been changing so that many people felt that the freedom was a trifle hollow and the plenty was a myth. Far down below the foundations of society there had for years been a deep potential of unrest, of which the senseless Know-Nothing agitation had been only a symbol. Long before anyone fired a cannon at Fort Sumter, such dissimilar men as Thaddeus Stevens and John C. Calhoun had warned of the danger of "social convulsion." Stevens himself, a "radical" in the jargon of that day, was in fact a typical Pennsylvania Republican (in the modern sense of the term) on most issues aside from slavery. He was as much a conservative, in his own way, as Calhoun himself, a spokesman for solid established interests. It was precisely men of that kind who had brought this war about, and the war had taken the lid off things. In one sense, the great fight over slavery and the Union had channeled off the resentments which might have produced the convulsion which Stevens and Calhoun had both feared.
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In another sense, it was giving those resentments an opening. In the incredible last analysis, victory might yet mean that to destroy one kind of slavery was to weaken all other kinds.

Meanwhile men were confused and bewildered, and there were strange eddies and backwashes in the tide of history in 1863. If there was trouble in Pennsylvania there were other troubles all across the Middle West, following a familiar pattern: opposition to the draft, sporadic riots, occasional murders, with the Copperhead leaders tossed about on waves which they supposed they were controlling. What was corning up seems to have been less a will to end the war than a blind, angry determination to make it mean something, even though no one could say just what that something might be. As one perplexed Republican reported, "the people are desirous of some change, they scarcely know what."
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In southern Illinois most of the people were recent immigrants from the Southland, and although they were stoutly loyal to the Union they disliked the Negro and refused to fight to end slavery. The 128th Illinois, recruited from that territory, lost nearly all of its members by desertion, the men declaring that "they would lie in the woods until the moss grew on their backs rather than help free the slaves."

So that spring Federal troops went into Illinois, and the 16th Illinois Cavalry, not sharing the anti-Negro sentiments of the 128th, found itself clumping and clanking across Williamson County to quell disturbances and lay the fear upon all Copperheads. They hit the countryfolk with a hard heavy hand. The Union League, newly organized by loyalists as a counterweight to the Knights of the Golden Circle, had been busy sniffing out treason, and it provided the cavalry with long lists of places where deserters were hidden. The regiment split up into platoons which went about the countryside, each with its little list, and the alarm was spread and people took to the woods. A young officer in charge of one of these squads found himself deeply puzzled by the whole business. He had enlisted to fight the Southern Confederacy and here he was, harrying the people of his own state in their own homes, and he wrote, bewildered:

"What were we there for? It is true that they had been harboring and secreting deserters from the Union Army, but for this was their property to be consumed by fire and were they to be marched off to some fort, there to be guarded as prisoners of war?"

It was a poor day, he recorded, when they brought fewer than twenty-five prisoners into camp, but he acknowledged that "such jumping fences, such riding through fields and woods, such searching smokehouses, garrets, barns, and cellars, such hanging men to trees for the purpose of extorting secrets, such breaking up and dispersing courts and grand juries, such foraging"—in plain violation of all law, as he felt—"I never before heard of at any time, in Illinois or any other state."
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Thus in Illinois, with barns and hayricks ablaze, and farm folk hiding out in the timber while troopers rode through the cornfields with drawn sabers glinting in the sun. There was also Ohio, and in Ohio there was a man named Clement Laird Vallandigham, until recently a Democratic congressman, who was minded now to become governor of Ohio and to make some use of the discontent and weariness and perplexity bora of the war. Vallandigham was a tall handsome man with a politician's too-easy smile, a talent for using words, and a long record of unwavering opposition to the coercion of the South. Barely a month after Lincoln's election Vallandigham had warned a caucus of Ohio's congressional delegation that he would under no circumstances agree to the use of force against the South. Some of those present understood him to threaten war in the North if force should be tried. He was cold, calculating, profoundly ambitious, with a way of expressing himself that sounded self-righteous at times, a man not above appealing to prejudice when it would serve his turn. Early that winter of 1863, as a lame-duck congressman (his district had been gerrymandered to prevent his re-election) he had taunted the Republicans in the House:

"The war for the Union is, in your hands, a most bloody and costly failure. . . . War for the Union was abandoned; war for the Negro openly begun, and with stronger battalions than before. With what success? Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer." He wanted peace, and peace at once, and he cried: "Ought this war to continue? I answer no—not a day, not an hour. What then? Shall we separate? Again I answer no, no, no!" His program was simple, based upon faith: "Stop fighting. Make an armistice. Accept at once friendly foreign mediation."

Under the surface Vallandigham saw, or at least professed to see, the same specter that had haunted Calhoun and Stevens, and the belief that desperate forces might be let loose by continued war ran under his impassioned sentences like a somber leitmotif: "I see nothing before us but universal political and social revolution, anarchy and bloodshed, compared with which the Reign of Terror in France was a merciful visitation."
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So here was Vallandigham, stumping Ohio for the governorship, seeking to capitalize on the people's deep belief that a word should be spoken that would explain this war and give it meaning. Also in Ohio, by the oddest chance, was Major General Ambrose E. Burnside, and his path was about to cross Vallandigham's.

After his ineffectual effort to purge the high command of the Army of the Potomac, Burnside had been quietly shelved. His offer to resign his commission had not been accepted, and he had been assigned to command the Department of the Ohio, which included the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. There was no great number of troops in his department and not much fighting was going on there, and the assumption seems to have been that even this well-meaning author of misfortune could hardly bumble his way into any very serious trouble now.

But Burnside was an intensely loyal man, and the wave of unrest that was going across the land troubled him. Like Stanton, he saw things in unshaded blacks and whites, and it seemed to him that a great many things which were being said and done in his department smacked strongly of outright treason. He began to issue restrictive orders, prohibiting the citizens from keeping or bearing arms, and placing limits on the right to criticize the military policy of the administration. He climaxed these at last by promulgating General Order Number 38, which stated flatly, if somewhat clumsily, that "the habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed in this department. Persons committing such offenses will be at once arrested, with a view to being tried
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or sent beyond our lines into the lines of their friends." To make it perfectly clear, the order added that "it must be distinctly understood that treason, expressed or implied, will not be tolerated in this department."

Having said this, Burnside appointed a military commission to try any persons who might offend against General Order Number 38 and waited to see what would happen next.
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What would happen next would be a speech by Vallandigham, who was opening his political campaign with a big meeting in the town of Mount Vernon on May 1, the same day the Army of the Potomac was gathering around the Chancellorsville crossroads, with Hooker feeling the first chill wind of doubt and with Meade wondering how the bottom of a hill could be held if the top was untenable. It appears that Vallandigham accepted Burnside's order as a challenge, and a huge crowd was on hand to hear him respond to it. American flags floated from the tops of hickory poles (emblems of the Democracy ever since Andrew Jackson's day), and there was a great horse-drawn float carrying thirty-four pretty girls, who represented the thirty-four states of the whole Union. It was noticed that many men in the crowd wore in their lapels the emblems which had given the anti-war Democrats their name of Copperhead—copper heads cut from pennies and mounted on pins or clasps. In the crowd, lounging close to the platform with pencils and notebooks, were two officers of Burnside's command prepared to take down Vallandig-ham's words.

These officers did not give Burnside a very coherent account of the speech, contenting themselves with taking down stray phrases and sentences, but with the huge crowd cheering him on, Vallandigham spread himself. He talked sarcastically of "King Lincoln," specifically denounced General Order Number 38, and repeated all of his familiar arguments, seeing the war as a step toward despotism and demanding an immediate peace. It was a wild, fire-eating speech, coming tolerably close to an outright declaration of sympathy for the Confederacy, and when Burnside's officers got back to Cincinnati they gave the general notes which ruffled his whiskers. Reading them, Burnside concluded that he had an open-and-shut case. Without bothering to discuss the ins and outs of the matter with anybody, Burnside issued an order for Vallandigham's arrest.
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A night later an officer on Burnside's staff collected a company of infantry and took a special train from Cincinnati to Dayton, which was where Vallandigham lived. A little after two in the morning-graveyard watch, town silent as the tomb soldiers' footsteps echoing off the cobbles of quiet streets—heavy hands beat loudly on the door of Vallandigham's house. From an upstairs window the orator asked what was wanted and was told to open up, men had come to arrest him. A revolver was fired into the air, and Vallandigham lifted his voice to yell, "Asa! Asa! Asa!" into the night, this call being the alarm signal for anti-war Democrats. Musket butts smashed in the door, and the officer and a squad of soldiers went to Vallandigham's bedroom and told him he had just time to get dressed and catch a train. Protesting bitterly, and dressing the while, Vallandigham went with them, and that morning he was lodged in a military prison in Cincinnati. In Dayton an angry mob sacked the office of a Republican newspaper, starting a fire that burned out several non-partisan business establishments, and from his prison cell Vallandigham issued statements denouncing the author and the manner of his arrest and asserting: "I am here in a military bastille for no other offense than my political opinions."