Glory Road (39 page)

This was true enough as far as it went, but the military were in control, and on May 6 Vallandigham went on trial before
Burn
side's military commission, accused of violating General Order Number 38. The two officers who had taken notes testified for the prosecution: Vallandigham had denounced the war as "wicked, cruel, and unnecessary" and had said in so many words that it was not being waged to preserve the Union but "for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism." He had unquestionably violated Burnside's order, if that order had any validity.

Vallandigham did not think it had any, and he refused to recognize the commission or to plead his own cause, contenting himself with summoning one witness, another Democratic congressman, the widely known anti-war man S. S. Cox, who had been among the speakers at Mount Vernon but whose remarks had been somewhat less inflammatory. Vallandigham was returned to his prison cell, and a lawyer went to the United States Circuit Court to demand a writ of habeas corpus.
¹⁹

Rightly or wrongly, writs of habeas corpus did not run in this case, and the court refused to intervene. So on May 16 the military commission announced that it had found Vallandigham guilty of violating General Order Number 38 by publicly expressing "sympathy for those in arms against the government of the United States, and declaring disloyal sentiments and opinions with the object and purpose of weakening the power of the government in its efforts to suppress an unlawful rebellion." It sentenced him to be imprisoned for the duration of the war. Burnside promptly confirmed the sentence, ordering the man confined in Fort Warren at Boston.

Up to now Vallandigham had been just another candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor of Ohio. By act of Burnside he immediately became a martyr, nationally famous, and the land erupted with mass meetings of furious Democrats denouncing military despotism. Vallandigham's nomination for the Ohio governorship was a foregone conclusion. Worse yet, it was equally certain that the Democratic party in Ohio—and possibly everywhere else in the North—would now pass firmly into the hands of the faction that wanted to make immediate peace with the Confederacy. And this mess was dropped on Lincoln's desk while Lincoln was still trying to digest the bad news from Chancellorsville.

Unfortunately Burnside was not yet out of ammunition. Having struck a blow at treason in Ohio, he looked over into Illinois, where in addition to Southern-born residents who hid deserters and supported the Knights of the Golden Circle there was a pestiferous newspaper, the Chicago
Times,
which had long been saying in print exacdy the sort of thing Vallandigham had said on the Mount Vernon platform. Burnside never had been able to tell a good strategic move from a bad one, and he was always fated to make a defect rather than a virtue out of the fact that he never knew when he had bitten off more than he could chew. Early on the morning of June 3, by his express order, cavalrymen rode up a Chicago street and mounted guard at the door of the
Times
office, and an hour or so later two companies of infantry from Camp Douglas came marching into the place. They took the building over, stopped the presses, and prevented further publication of the paper.

Thus after suppressing freedom of speech Burnside had suppressed freedom of the press, and it was up to Lincoln to say whether it was going to be that kind of war from now on.

Lincoln moved warily. Both actions had been taken without his knowledge, and the Vallandigham case was by far the hotter potato of the two. It may be that as he cast about for an expedient the President remembered Burnside's earlier statement that offenders against General Order Number 38 might be sent "beyond our lines into the lines of their friends." In any case, that finally seemed to strike him as a solid idea, and he canceled that part of the military commission's verdict which ordered Vallandigham imprisoned. Instead he had him sent down under guard to General Rosecrans, who was holding the line in front of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and one morning not long after that a squad of soldiers escorted the orator out into the desolate no man's land between Union and Confederate lines and turned him over to the Confederacy, to do with as the Confederacy might choose. Suppression of the Chicago
Times
was revoked outright, the troops were removed, and Burnside was warned to arrest no more civilians and shut down no more newspapers without prior authorization from Washington.

The Confederacy hardly knew what to do with its new guest. He flitted cross-country to Charleston, South Carolina, his position sufficiently embarrassing both to himself and to his hosts, and eventually he took a ship for Canada. Before he sailed he found time to hold a quiet conversation with a representative of Jefferson Davis's government, in which he is alleged to have betrayed an inner fear—that the Confederacy might yet fold up, leaving Vallandigham without a cause. The Northern peace party, he insisted, was on the climb, and if the South could just hold out for another year everything would be fine, as the Democrats would then "sweep the Lincoln dynasty out of political existence." He offered one curious piece of advice which was totally ignored but which might profitably have been listened to: Whatever happens, do not again invade the North, because if you do all parties there will unite to throw you out and Lincoln's hand will be so strengthened that he will be able to go on with the war with new vigor.
²⁰
(Lee was perfecting his plans for a march into Pennsylvania, and farther west John Hunt Morgan was
marshalling
his troopers for a dash across the Ohio, and it was as if this leader of the Copperheads was crying, Don't take our Copperhead uprisings so seriously. We won't stick if it comes to real fighting; we are men of politics and fine words and that is all we can ever be.)

In Canada, a martyr-in-absentia, Vallandigham issued statements and exhortations to the faithful in Ohio, and when the Ohio Democrats held their state convention in Columbus in June they drew an enthusiastic crowd of forty thousand people. For the balance of the summer Lincoln was painstakingly explaining his course in regard to Vallandigham's arrest, sounding at times, perhaps, rather more like a clever lawyer than a statesman but at least explaining, and leaving one difficult question for the opposition to answer as best it could: "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts and not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?"
²¹

For Lincoln was shooting soldier boys that spring, and desertion was no longer being treated as a minor fault. The V Army Corps was drawn up in an open field one day, solid masses of bronzed veterans grouped around three sides of an open square, tattered flags motionless above them. One of the soldiers remembered afterward:

"The impressive silence was not broken by a single sound. Each line of soldiers looked more like the section of a vast machine than a line composed of living men. The silence was suddenly and sadly broken by the sounds of approaching music—not the quick, inspiring strains with which we were so familiar, but a measured, slow and solemn dirge, whose weird, sorrowful notes were poured forth like the moanings of lost spirits. Not a soldier spoke, but every eye was turned in the direction from which came the sad and mournful cadences, and we saw the procession."

First came a band playing the "Funeral March." Then came sixty men from the provost guard, spick-and-span in dress uniforms, rifles at the shoulder. After them were four soldiers carrying a black coffin, followed by a condemned deserter in blue pants and white shirt, a guard on either side of him; then four more men with another coffin, followed by another prisoner, and another detachment with another coffin, and so on—five condemned deserters in all, each preceded by his coffin, with a final detachment from the provost guard bringing up the rear. The procession came to the open side of the square, where five graves had been dug. A coffin was put on the ground before each grave, and each prisoner sat on the end of his coffin. Black blindfolds were put on the prisoners, thousands of men looking on in utter silence, and then the chaplains came up beside the condemned men for a final word and a prayer. The chaplains retired, and a firing squad of twelve men took post facing each prisoner, one blank charge in every twelve rifles, so that any member of a firing squad might later, if it comforted him, think that perhaps he himself had not actually killed anyone. An officer stepped out, brisk and businesslike, sword hooked up at his side, and the great silence was broken by his thin cry: "Ready—aim—
fire!"
And the thing was done, five bleeding bodies lay across the coffins, and the band piped up a quickstep while the soldiers marched off the field.
²²

That was the spring when words were no good in America. The war had given the country problems for which the past offered no guide—problems, indeed, which grew out of the total explosion of the shell which the past had built around human institutions—and men were not going to talk their way out of them. It was what they did that was going to count. A musket butt could smash in a man's door in the dead of night, troopers with drawn sabers might drag farmers off to prison camp under a prairie moon, veterans of great battles might have to stand in formal ranks to see deserters executed, and what it all added up to could be told only after men had acted.

Yet there was an immense vitality at work. In their reaction to war-weariness and defeat both the people and the government were showing signs of a new temper. Here was no inert resignation to despair. Trouble was being met head-on now—stupidly, in some cases, brutally in others, but at least squarely. The country was no longer numb. Slowly and with infinite pain, strength was being gathered, and the danger soon would be that the ultimate answer might be sought in strength alone. The Republican stalwart, War Governor Buckingham of Connecticut, was exultantly telling his legislature to get on with the war: "Let the retribution be so terrible that future generations shall not dare to repeat the crime." The final tragedy would occur if retribution alone should become the answer.

The word could not be spoken yet. The grapes of wrath were being trampled out, and there was a great clamor of many voices. There would have to be, finally, an hour of decision, with the uproar coming to its own terrible climax. After that, if anyone could understand and speak for the myriad people who were crying their complaints, a voice might be heard.

2. Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

Things were looking up, and it seemed that the crisis had been passed, and the newspaper editor took up his pen and wrote his jubilation for all the world to read.

"Aladdin with his wonderful lamp could scarcely have worked a more magical change," he announced. "All honor, we say, to the men who have battled long and bravely to secure this consummation— who have stood up in the dark days of the enterprise and pressed onward, through the most discouraging difficulties, until their efforts have been finally crowned with glorious success!"

The editor was a loyal Pennsylvanian, editor of the Crawford County
Democrat,
writing in the very middle of the Civil War, but he was not talking about the progress of the national arms, the suppression of Copperheads, or the state of the war for union and freedom. Instead he was being inspired by the fact that a new railroad line had pushed its way into the heart of the Pennsylvania oil fields, and what he was growing most lyrical about was the sight of half a dozen locomotives all p
uffin
g at once, long trains of cars laden with oil barrels waiting in the yards, a brand-new brick refinery, a handsome hotel, many new dwelling houses, the ensemble now visible "where, but a few months since, stood the primeval forest." This was in the town of Cony, which in a short time had mushroomed from nothing at all to 10,000 inhabitants and a $12,000,000 annual business. At Meadville the editor saw further marvels, including a new depot with a 327-foot train shed, and a fine hotel "which has brought to this little city of the west the luxury and magnificence of New York living." He paid his respects to "the old fogies who have imagined that our town was finished and should be fenced in," and he announced unhesitatingly that "a new era of prosperity is about to dawn upon us."
¹

T
he editor was quite right. Prosperity was at hand, for Meadville and for Corry and for all the rest of the North, and it might seem that the great news of the day was not so much the progress of the armies as the miracle that was taking place behind the lines. Pennsylvania was having an oil boom, with a new product and a new technology coming up to provide wealth and employment that had not previously existed. (In 1859 oil production was a scant 84,000 gallons; three years later it had gone up to 128,000,000, the cheap kerosene lamp was beginning to displace candles and whale oil, and a pious young businessman named John D. Rockefeller was watching attentively.) Yet this new industry was only one of many, and possibly the year of jubilee was at hand. All across the North a tremendous transformation was taking place, and if an editor babbled about magic and Aladdin's lamp, it was hardly surprising. The country was on its way with a rush and a roar, gaining new strength almost by geometrical progression, and perhaps the war was a spare-time venture, with most of the country's attention fixed on more important matters.

(General
Robert E. Lee was beginning ski
llfully to move toward the upper Rappahannock, concealing the shift behind a show of strength along the hills back of Fredericksburg, and Jeb Stuart was assembling the largest cavalry corps the Confederacy ever saw on the open hills and fields near Brandy Station, preparing for a hard thrust into the North. His equilibrium regained, Hooker watched closely and prepared countermoves, and men began to see the prospect of a great climactic battle on Northern soil.)