Never Call Retreat (27 page)

To bring matters to a head there was the excessive zeal displayed by General Ambrose E. Burnside.

After he lost command of the Army of the Potomac, Burnside was sent to Cincinnati to command the Department of the Ohio—roughly, the Middle West plus Kentucky. This was mostly peaceful country and the commanding general did not have much to do, which was why Burnside was sent there; but he arrived in this springtime of discontent, looked about him with the eyes of a frontline commander, and concluded that the Ohio country was displaying dangerous disloyalty. On April 19, with a tactical judgment no better than that of Fredericksburg, Burnside issued General Orders No. 38, announcing that "the habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy will no longer be tolerated," and threatening dire punishment for all who aided the rebellion. The order concluded: "It must be distinctly understood that treason, expressed or implied, will not be tolerated in this department."
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Having published this the general awaited developments.

The first development was provided almost at once by Clement L. Vallandigham, who was just the man to respond to this kind of challenge and who probably was the man Burnside had chiefly in mind in the first place. Vallandigham, who was running for the Democratic nomination for the governorship (and making a good deal of headway) went to Mount Vernon, Ohio, and on May 1 addressed a large and enthusiastic audience. He voiced straight Vallandigham doctrine: the national administration did not want to make peace but was fighting to free the blacks and enslave the whites, General Orders No. 38 was a base usurpation of arbitrary power, men who meekly submitted to the conscription act did not deserve to be called free men, and "King Lincoln" must eventually be dethroned by the action of citizens at the ballot box. At this distance the speech sounds like little more than an ordinary, arm-flapping stump speech made in the heat of a lively political campaign, but to Burnside (who had an agent present, making notes) it sounded like treason, either expressed or implied. A few days later Burnside sent a company of infantry to Vallandigham's home in Dayton and the soldiers broke in the doors at midnight, caught Vallandigham in his underwear, gave him time to dress, hauled him forth despite his vigorous protests and took him to Cincinnati, where they put him in prison. Citizens of Dayton rioted vigorously to express their disapproval, burning the office of a Republican newspaper, several unoffending retail stores, and a livery stable; which helped not at all. On May 6 Vallandigham went on trial before a military commission, accused of violating Burn-side's order, of expressing sympathy for the secessionists and of trying to weaken the government's efforts "to suppress an unlawful rebellion."
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Caught in the net, Vallandigham took on a new quality, dignity, and refused to plead. He scorned the authority of the soldiers, reading a formal statement saying that if he had violated any law he ought to be arrested by the civil authority, indicted by a regular grand jury, and tried in a civilian court; adding that he demanded his rights under the Constitution. It got him nowhere. The military commission found him guilty and ordered him imprisoned "in some fortress of the United States" for the balance of the war.

It had gone this far; for making a stump speech, a candidate for governor could be seized by the army, tried by army officers and locked up in an army prison—largely, when all was said and done, because General Burnside did not approve of what Candidate Vallandigham had been saying. In faraway Richmond, an official of the Confederate War Department made his comment: "This only was wanting to demonstrate how utterly that people" (meaning of course the lost-to-salvation Yankee race) "have lost every pretence of civil liberty. Shades of John and Samuel Adams! To what have your descendants come?" In less-faraway Albany there was a mass meeting in front of the state capitol, and people cheered when they heard a message from Governor Seymour declaring that Vallandigham's arrest "has brought dishonor upon our country" and predicting that Mr. Lincoln's handling of the case "will determine, in the minds of more than one half of the people of the loyal states, whether this war is waged to put down rebellion at the South or destroy free institutions at the North."
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There were formalities. Through counsel, Vallandigham appealed for a writ of habeas corpus, and the motion was heard by Judge Humphrey H. Leavitt in Federal Court.

Judge Leavitt noted that President Lincoln had suspended the right of the writ, and that General Burnside was unquestionably the President's agent. Apparently the President was trying to exercise his constitutional authority, the chief problem being that the Constitution did not say exactly what the President's authority in time of war really was. It seemed clear to the judge that "the President is guided solely by his own judgment and discretion, and is only amenable for an abuse of his authority by impeachment, prosecuted according to the requirements of the Constitution." Therefore: Burnside had not exceeded his authority, the application for a writ was denied, and Vallandigham stayed arrested.
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It all landed, of course, on Mr. Lincoln's desk. He had several things to think about, beginning with the cold fact that what Burnside had done was making a martyr out of Vallandigham and might make him governor of Ohio, and going on to the need to strike a balance between the ancient right of freedom of speech and the overpowering necessity to win a war. Winning the war came first. Mr. Lincoln commuted Vallandigham's sentence, ordering him sent, not to prison, but into the Confederacy. On May 25 Federal cavalry took Vallandigham through Rosecrans' lines near Murfreesboro and turned him over to surprised Confederate pickets, who hastily sought guidance from the rear and then, lacking anything better to do, accepted their charge. An unwilling exile, Vallandigham flitted across the Confederacy, got at last to a seaport, took ship for Canada, went to lower Ontario, and waited across the river from Detroit for a proper chance to get back to his constituency. He had been the victim of sharp practice, but his real trouble was that he had finally run into a middle western politician who played his own game a little faster than he himself did . . . and all without due process of law. Meanwhile, the President had a barbed answer for those who complained. To leading Democrats of New York, who had set forth their protests at length, he posed a question: "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?"
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Unfortunately, Burnside was not yet out of ammunition. On the night of June 2 a squad of soldiers, at his order, entered the offices of the Chicago
Times
and stopped the paper's publication.

Publisher of the
Times
was Wilbur Storey, who was admittedly a hard case. He had bought the paper early in 1861, and with skill and vigor had made it one of the most influential Democratic organs in the west. Originally, he had supported the war and called for subjugation of the South, but when the administration struck at slavery his tone changed; he denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as "the most wicked, atrocious and revolting deed recorded in the annals of civilization," and of late he had been demanding peace as the only means of saving American freedom. He wrote without restraint, and his editorials had a hard bite to them; he spoke for the Northerners who detested abolition and wanted the war taken back to its old, limited aims, but he spoke with more fury and a more bitter invective than anyone else was using, and to a man like Burnside he looked as dangerous as a Confederate army. One exasperated Union officer asserted later that Storey's
Times
was "chief among those instigators of insurrection and treason, the foul and damnable reservoir which supplied the lesser sewers with political filth, falsehood and treason." That was the tone Storey himself used and that was the tone he provoked in others, and now Federal soldiers occupied his editorial rooms and kept his presses from operating.

Naturally, the suppression of this newspaper stirred up immense trouble. The lower house of the Illinois legislature resolved that the act was "so revolutionary and despotic" that it was "equivalent to the overthrow of our government." A mass meeting of Chicagoans held that whatever the
Times
had said the remedy (if any remedy was needed) lay with the courts and not with the army, and in New York fifteen newspaper and magazine editors met, with none other than Horace Greeley presiding, and unanimously affirmed "the right of the press to criticize firmly and fearlessly the acts of those charged with the administration of the Government, also those of all their civil and military subordinates." The administration could not resist this kind of storm, and at Mr. Lincoln's direction Secretary Stanton got off a hurried message to Burnside: revoke the order of suspension, get the soldiers out of there, and in the future arrest no speakers or editors without first getting clearance from Washington. The
Times
resumed publication, jubilantly proclaiming that

"the right of free speech has not passed away ... we have, then, still a free press."
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The cases of orator Vallandigham and editor Storey had long echoes heard far to the south. With the Yankees in such trouble at home, might not this be a good time to suggest a peace settlement? To Vice-President Alexander Stephens it seemed that some sort of opening existed, and from his home in Georgia he wrote to President Davis about it.

The Confederate government had been wanting to make a new arrangement with the Federals regarding prisoner exchanges, and Stephens suggested that he be appointed to try it. If he could confer with President Lincoln about prisoners, he said, "I am not without hope that
indirectly
I could now turn attention to a general adjustment upon such basis as might ultimately be acceptable to both parties and stop the further effusion of blood in a contest so irrational, unchristian and so inconsistent with all recognized American principles." He admitted that the odds were against him; "but still, be assured, I am not without
some
hopes of success." (He explained that the "general adjustment" he wanted would of course be based on acceptance of the idea of Southern independence.) Mr. Davis read this letter, and promptly invited Mr. Stephens to come to Richmond. Late in June the President, the Vice-President, and the cabinet conferred on the matter.
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Characteristically, Stephens himself by now had lost faith in his own proposal. He felt certain that Mr. Lincoln would not see him, and he doubted that the attempt should even be made, but Mr. Davis and the cabinet saw it otherwise. Agreeing that Mr. Lincoln would not ordinarily want to talk to any Confederate emissary, they pointed out that since Stephens wrote his letter the picture had changed: the Army of Northern Virginia was in Pennsylvania now, and it probably would win a victory before long. As Stephens remembered it, they held that "the prospect of success was increased by the position and projected movements of General Lee's army." So, armed with a letter signed by Mr. Davis, Stephens went to Hampton Roads and sent a note to Rear Admiral S. P. Lee, Federal naval commander there, identifying himself as "a military commissioner" and asking permission to go to Washington under flag of truce to talk with President Lincoln.

The presidential letter Stephens carried was unusual, for in it Mr. Davis did something that he had not done before and would not do again. He identified himself, not as President of the Confederate States of America, but simply as "commander-in-chief of the land and naval forces now waging war against the United States." As all men knew, Mr. Lincoln refused to admit that there was a Confederate States of America, and he would accept no message signed by its President, because if he did he might thereby, inadvertently, recognize the existence of whatever it was that the letter-writer was president of. He could not fail to admit, however, that certain land and naval forces were making war against the United States, and to accept a letter from the commander of those forces would commit him to nothing. If flexibility would help, Mr. Davis could be flexible.
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It accomplished nothing. Admiral Lee notified Washington of Stephens' mission, and Mr. Lincoln discussed the matter with his cabinet; suggesting, to the statesmen's horror, that he just might go down to Fort Monroe and see what Stephens had on his mind. Secretary Seward opposed this, considering Stephens dangerous (it seems an odd epithet for Stephens, somehow) and in the end Stephens was rebuffed: if his people had anything to say about prisoner exchanges they could say it through regular military channels, but neither he nor any other person could go to Washington. Stephens went back to Georgia, and he wrote to a friend: "The prospect before us presents nothing cheering to me."
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He would have been no more cheerful if he had actually had that talk with Mr. Lincoln, because there was nothing the two men could have said to one another. The situation in the North offered much less than hopeful Southerners believed. What was taking shape was not a peace party at all. It only looked like one, as tipster Barnett pointed out to leading Democrat Barlow. Even Ohio's Sunset Cox, who did his best to get Vallandigham out of Burnside's grip, said that his fellow Democrats "want security at home even more than peace in the land" and reported that it would be easy to line them up in support of McClellan—who hated the Lincoln administration but as a soldier believed in keeping on with the war until the Confederacy surrendered.
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Northern discontent, in short, in 1863 reflected no readiness to give up the fight for the Union. It did reflect deepseated fears—that civil liberties were being crushed, that the mere act of going on with the war was changing America permanently, that peace had become unattainable when the administration came out for emancipation—but it was not defeatist. It reflected, too, the existence of the Northerner's own mirage: the faith that Southerners did not really mean what they said about independence and would happily return to the Union once the administration suppressed the abolitionists and gave up the attempt to outlaw slavery. In the spring of 1863 there was no foundation at all for this belief, but it had a hardy life.