THE ENTIRE Confederacy had been based on a succession of
presuppositions. The North would not fight; Cotton was king;
Europe would recognize the new nation and intervene; the
South would prove invincible upon the field of battle; the Union would
ultimately acknowledge the futility of the war; Northerners would not
fight to end slavery. One after another these cherished shibboleths were
proven false; the illusions were stripped away, and reality forced itself
on Southern consciousness.
There were of course ups and downs, and this was hardly a straight
linear progression. In late 1862 and early 1863 it did indeed look as
if the South were militarily invincible, and as if the Union war effort
were a failure. Fredericksburg and then Chancellorsville seemed to
demonstrate the triumph of Southern valor, but then came, in a rush
in July, Vicksburg and Gettysburg; Confederate morale took a downturn,
and Union morale correspondingly improved. So the seesaw went
back and forth, and good news for one side was bad for the other.
Few men had the length of view, in the middle of such an allconsuming
struggle, to realize what all these victories and losses for
either side really meant, which was, sadly, not much at all. Fredericksburg
and Chancellorsville attested to the skill of Robert E. Lee and
his army, or to the incompetence of his opponents. Gettysburg equally
demonstrated the inability of the Confederacy to sustain an invasion,
or a large-scale raid—they were never entirely certain which it had
been—of the North. But none of the three had significantly altered
the military balance, except to remove several thousand healthy young
men from the rolls of either side. Even Vicksburg, the one battle of
the four mentioned here that actually had some strategic significance,
served essentially to strengthen an already established situation, the
isolation of the western portion of the Confederacy. So in geostrategic
or purely military terms, none of the four battles was as decisive as
they each were dramatic. In the sense of morale, of course, Vicksburg
and Gettysburg can now be recognized as significant turning points,
the beginning of a long painful decline for the Confederacy, the sense
for men in the North that yes, they would win if only they could stick
to it long enough to do so. Since up to that time there had been almost
as many doubters as there had been believers, in the morale sense they
were extremely important battles.
What all this really shows is that the war was assuming a different
character from that anticipated by those who first partook of it. Almost
all wars do that, of course; in the case of the individual, few of the
people who go off to war find that it is what they expected it to be,
and in the collective sense, few states or peoples get out of war what
they thought they would get when they entered it. The Civil War was
thus hardly unique in this respect, but its effects were profound beyond
all expectation. Not only was it the first modern war, a thing its participants
could hardly have been expected to realize, but it also hastened
the great transformation of American life. The war brought about the
very triumph of "Northern," or "modern," values that the Southerners
who seceded hoped to prevent. Many scholars for this reason have called
the Civil War a second American Revolution.
None of this would have happened had the war been won or lost by
the end of 1862—had it been possible, that is, to achieve the fondly
anticipated and long-sought battlefield decision. Since it was not, more
mundane factors became increasingly important. Staying power was
not simply a matter of how many men were willing to fight and die,
but to what extent their societies could sustain them while they did
so. Could the Confederacy, while fighting for its life, build a sufficiently
viable polity that it could maintain the struggle through to victory?
Or could the North so mobilize its superior resources, and receive
enough support from enough of its citizens, that it could successfully
complete its self-imposed task of the destruction of the Confederacy?
We now know, of course, the answer to both of these questions. But
the men and women of 1863 could no more know the end of their
endeavors than we can know the end of ours.
Scholars have differed mightily on the question of why the war took
the course it did; they have, indeed, agreed upon little more than who
won and who lost. Of all the areas of argument, none has been more
fertile than that of the running of the Confederacy. Was it a noble
effort that simply attempted a task beyond its strength, or was it a
ramshackle hodgepodge of incompetent, selfish men, making the
wrong decisions for the wrong reasons? The simple answer is, it was
both. Like all human institutions, it had nobility and baseness in it.
In the classic example, or personification, take Jefferson Davis; few
men had more nobility of mind or a higher character than did Jefferson
Davis, and few could be more petty or small-minded than he. At least
one authority has suggested that if Davis and Lincoln had changed
places, the Confederacy would have won the war. But of course there
was more right, and more wrong, with the Confederate government
than the personality of its president.
One of its chief failings, oddly enough, was the lack of an organized
party system. The idea of political parties, or "factions" as they were
originally called, developed in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and they were for a long time thought to be invidious.
Southerners still tended to regard them in that light. In fact they were,
and are, essential to the parliamentary or republican system. They focused
ideas, and created currents of policy, and enabled men to function
in cohesive, and coherent, groups. They offered the possibility of alternative
courses of action based upon policies rather than upon mere
personalities. Davis and his fellow politicians eschewed them, thinking
themselves too high-minded to descend to party politics. The result
was that Davis could never build a secure political base in his Congress
or in his country, and his opposition could never offer a different course
based on anything more substantial than personal likes or dislikes.
Confederate politics became a welter of individuals, all shouting against
the wind, pulling this way and that, and ultimately reduced to supporting
or opposing Davis simply because he was Davis. Even his own
vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens of Georgia, broke with
the government, spent eighteen months of the war at home, and sat
only rarely in the war cabinet through which Davis governed his country.
This one example may be taken as more or less typical of the
political confusion that reigned in Richmond.
Equally contentious were the relations between the central government
of the Confederacy and its component states. Philosophically, of
course, the entire basis of the Confederacy was the denial by individual
states of a larger spirit of voluntary cooperation; in practice, therefore,
developing a central Confederate government was an uphill struggle.
The several state governors jealously guarded their own prerogatives,
and repudiated the actions and authority of the Richmond government
whenever it suited their own interests. Governor Zebulon Vance of
North Carolina was especially insistent upon his state's rights, and in
Georgia a triumvirate of politicians, Vice President Stephens, Governor
Joseph Brown, and Davis's defeated rival for the presidency, Robert
Toombs, spent practically the entire war feuding with the central government
and opposing its policies. The separate states held back troops
and supplies for their own use, refused to enforce laws passed by the
central government, and went their own ways whenever it suited them.
The effect of all this is a bit uncertain; some historians have argued
that in looking to their own interests, the states were merely accomplishing
for themselves many of the tasks the central government
would have had to do, or try to do, anyway. But others have argued
that this particularism was the chief failing of the Confederacy, and
that it cost the South the war, that the theory of states' rights, carried
to a destructive extreme, was what caused it to fail. One writer suggested
that on the Confederacy's tombstone should be engraved, "Died
of a Theory."
The southern part of the United States had always prided itself on
the quality of national political figure it had produced, and it was
something of a disappointment to find, when they were centered in
Richmond rather than Washington, that Confederate politicians were
such a mediocre lot. Idols when seen from afar, they were very much
clay seen close up.
And if the aspirant national government failed to develop a workable
political system, it failed even more miserably in its attempt to finance
a war. Fiscally, the new government got afloat on a wave of local patriotism,
which saw Southerners oversubscribe bond issues and make
loans and outright donations. But Richmond refused to set up a high
tariff on imports, because high tariffs initiated by the hated Yankees
had been one of the things Southerners objected to in the old union.
And in addition to denying itself that source of income, the government
also failed to tax its citizens for the first two years of the war.
Instead, Confederates established a taxation system analogous to their
military one, and after assessing the national property, they assigned
the respective states quotas, and left them to meet the demand. The
states, rather than taxing, simply borrowed the money; in other words,
as we are doing today, the Confederates passed their debts on to their
children.
The central government did offer a number of bond issues, but except
for the very early ones, they did not do well. The first was sold
for specie, hard money; subsequent ones went for depreciated paper
money, and eventually even for farm produce, as paper money became
worthless and hard money disappeared. At one point the government
was offering the very favorable rate of 8 percent return, compared with
a mere 2.9 percent in the North, and still could find no subscribers,
which meant, of course, that investors had no faith in the ultimate
victory of the Confederacy.
Foreign loans, which the early Confederacy had optimistically expected,
proved even more disappointing. The only substantial one was
offered by a French banking firm, Erlanger and Company of Paris.
Erlanger offered a loan against imports of Confederate cotton, and then
issued bonds on the projected profit to be derived from the imports.
Most of the bonds were bought by British investors—in the 1860s
Britain had a great deal of surplus capital, and Britons could be got to
invest in almost any get-rich-quick scheme. In this case, Erlanger substantially
discounted the loan they gave the Confederacy, relatively
little of the cotton reached Europe, the bonds fell very quickly, the
investors lost almost all of their money, and the only people to profit
by the entire transaction were—Erlanger and Company of Paris, a result
that would surprise no one who knew anything about stocks and
bonds at the time.
It was not until 1863 that the Confederate government made any
serious attempt to tackle its revenue problems, and by then it was too
late. In April it introduced a tax on naval stores and various agricultural
products, a licensing tax on occupations, a sales tax of from 2 l/z to 8
percent, and an income tax that ranged from 1 percent on incomes of
$1,000 to 15 percent on incomes of $10,000 or more. The government
also introduced an agricultural tax in kind, and sent agents around to
confiscate farmers' produce. As there was little ready coin in the country,
the money taxes were fairly easy to evade, but the tax in kind was
bitterly resented, and even when items were collected, they were so
difficult to move that a great deal was wasted. Through the entire war,
the Confederacy, according to estimates, paid for no more than 1 percent
of its real expenses through taxation.
If politics and fiscal policies were both Confederate failures, the issue
of production of goods and services, both for the actual waging of the
war and for the sustenance of the population as a whole, is more problematical.
For one thing, this covers such a wide spectrum of items
that any generalization is bound to be wrong in many particulars, and
students of the wartime economy have therefore found it very difficult
to reach a broad consensus. The Confederacy obviously created a satisfactory
munitions industry, and for most of the war produced, or
imported, the supplies needed to keep its armies in the field. It was
less successful in other war-related endeavors. For example, the naval
side of the war has story after story of Confederate vessels destroyed
when near completion, or burned to avoid capture, or breaking down
in action. Given the weakness of pre-war Southern shipbuilding capacity,
this is hardly surprising. A similar failure was in railroad building
and maintenance; the unexpected success of the Southern railroad
system for much of the war has already been considered, but by the
end of it, the system was indeed collapsing. The Confederacy did not,
could not, produce enough rails or rolling stock to replace wear and
war wastage, and as the war progressed, the system became more rickety.
There were more wrecks and more delays, and badly needed goods
sat idle on sidings for days and weeks. Once the Union forces began
their large-scale incursions into the heart of the Confederacy, they did
damage that simply could not be repaired. By then, of course, the whole
Confederacy was teetering toward collapse anyway.
How much derived from fundamental inadequacies, how much from
the wastage of war itself, is a subject of considerable argument. The
South possessed a great number of draft animals; but increasing numbers
of these went for the war, impressed by supply officers from the
army, first horses and then even mules and oxen. But a horse taken for
the army meant one less to pull a plow, and therefore a diminution of
the food crops that army, and also the civilian population, also needed.
The government decreed that instead of planting cotton and tobacco,
money-making export crops that could not be exported, planters should
grow cereal crops instead. But there were still bread riots in the cities,
notably Richmond in 1863, because poor working women could not
afford to feed their families. Southern editors might attribute this unrest
to "Northern hirelings" and "the lowest, base-born classes," but
calling names did not lower the price of grain or put bread on the
table. There were shortages of everything, both agricultural and man-
ufactured goods. Needles were worth their weight in gold, Southern
soldiers in captured Union supply depots were seen eating salt by the
handful, and Confederates patriotically tried to convince themselves
that a variety of drinks made from nuts or bark were the equivalent of
coffee.
There was one shortage, however, even more troublesome, more crucial,
and more intrusive than any of these others—the shortage of bodies.
Southerners had rushed to arms in 1861, but within a year, most
of those willing to go to war had already done so. The Confederacy had
the same hierarchy of military service as the Union did, local militia,
state troops, and national army, with limitations upon the uses to
which each level might be put. Very quickly, even before Shiloh in the
west or the Peninsula campaign in the east, Southerners began to lose
their enthusiasm; what had looked like a lark in the spring of 1861
looked like something far more difficult in the spring of 1862. The
Confederate Congress replied to this growing sentiment with the first
conscription law in American history.
Officially, the law made eligible for conscription all white males
between eighteen and thirty-five years of age, to be liable for three
years' service. The law was actually meant less to conscript people than
it was to encourage volunteering, and it was successful in the sense of
achieving that. But there were several provisions that made the conscription
act highly unpalatable; first of all, there was a large list of
exemptions for various occupations, teachers, civil servants, industrial
workers, and so on, and for certain pacifist religions. It was also possible
to buy a substitute for fixed sums, which again meant that the poor
had to go, while the rich might avoid service if they chose. And later
an amendment offered exemption, or release from service, of planters
or overseers with twenty slaves under their control. This naturally
raised a howl of protest, that the slaveholders had caused the war, and
now wanted other men to fight it for them. The government maintained
that this provision was necessary for production purposes, as
well as for preservation of internal order. Eventually thay had to give
up both the slaveholding exemption and the substitutes, and to extend
the age limits for eligibility. War service, or the avoidance of it, caused
enormous bitterness, and one writer noted that by 1863 the South was
full ofwomen sitting around parlors saying to each other, "Why doesn't
your brother go to war?"
Ironically, the presence of African slaves in the South seemed to
exacerbate the whole issue. Slaves used as laborers for military fortifications,
and as agricultural workers, and in some cases industrial ones,
made a major contribution to the Confederate war economy. But they
were arguably as great a drain on it as a support to it, and the whole
Southern labor system broke down under the war itself. Slaves ran away,
they followed the Union armies as they invaded the South, they worked
slowly and unwillingly while their owners were away fighting. There
were of course the loyal house servants who identified with their rulers,
the stuff of subsequent romantic legend of the Old South, but the
existence of that hostile servile class presented Confederates with virtually
insurmountable dilemmas. As the horizon darkened, the inevitable
question arose: Should the slaves be used as soldiers? The mere
question itself illustrated how desperate the Confederacy finally was,
and how divorced from reality were its perceptions.
As the war went on, of course, increasing numbers of Southerners
were prepared to face reality; in other words, they became ever more
disillusioned with the war and its costs and sacrifices. Many had not
wanted secession, and certainly not war, in the first place. Thousands
of citizens from the South either fought openly for the Union, in what
have come to be called "orphan" units, or exercised covert antagonism,
or simply refused to support the cause of Southern independence. Western
Virginia seceded from its parent state, and east Tennessee came
close to doing likewise. In Louisiana there was a strong Unionist movement
as early as 1863. Still, all of these people, who may be considered
as passive Unionists, were less important than was the gradual erosion
of support among those who really had been in favor of secession and
Southern independence; these, after all, were the ones willing to fight
the war.
They were not ready to give up yet, but gradually they were being
worn down. Men were away, often killed or maimed, farms were
worked by women or not at all, shortages sapped the will to continue.
The Confederacy, in spite of maintaining itself militarily, simply did
not seem to be working well. The burden, as always, fell especially
heavily on the poorer classes, and every sizable town in the South was
filled with women and children who were in essence war refugees,
driven in from the country not by Union action—the Federals had not
yet developed their policy of penetrating raids—but simply by the
inability of society to wage war, and provide adequately for the families
of the soldiers doing the fighting. The Confederacy paid its private
soldiers eleven or thirteen dollars a month, almost nothing in the face
of upward-spiraling prices and lack of commodities. States and localities
attempted to provide relief for destitute military families, but
women who were proud that their men were fighting for their rights
resented being reduced to charity by that sacrifice. As 1863 limped
toward 1864, more and more soldiers received letters that said, "Why
don't you come home? The children are sick, I have no money, we can't
keep the farm going, what are we fighting for anyway?" Faced with
such complaints, men would stay for a while longer, through loyalty
to their friends or their units, through pride or principle or simple
stubbornness. They were a long way from ready to give up yet. Early
elation had been replaced by dogged determination; but unless there
was some substantial gain to show, that determination would ultimately
give way in turn to despair.
The costs and sacrifices of the war lay far lighter upon the Union than
upon the Confederacy. Not in the individual sense, of course; the Union
soldier who lost a leg suffered every bit as much as the Confederate
one; and the Union family whose son was killed mourned just as did
their cousins in the South. And the wife of a working-class Union
soldier may have had almost, but probably not quite, as hard a time
as her Southern counterpart. But in terms of society at large, the Union
managed to sustain its war effort and the associated costs far more
readily than did the Confederacy. Writers, especially Southern ones,
have often speculated that if the war had lain as heavily upon the North
as it did upon the Confederacy, the North would have given up, a sort
of retrospective apologia for the Confederacy's failure. Such an argument
misses the point, however, which is that wars are fought not to
see how much suffering can be endured, but to be won, and, to paraphrase
George Patton, they are won not by enduring suffering yourself,
but by inflicting suffering upon your opponent.
The picture of the North at war is indeed substantially different
from the picture of the South. Though both sides were forced by the
demands of the war to do much the same thing—both brought in
conscription, both suspended normal civil procedures (such as habeas
corpus), both increasingly centralized their governments, and on and
on—the North had more resources to work with, and in truth it mobilized
and utilized them more effectively in the long run.
President Lincoln, like his Confederate counterpart, faced opposition
from a variety of sources. Much more successfully than Davis, however,
Lincoln built a coalition of political support out of the party structure
that still functioned in the North. Lincoln drew his support basically
from moderate Republicans and from what were called "War Democrats,"
men who might be against him on party lines but were essentially
committed to the war and the maintenance of the Union. This
reduced the opposition to the two extremes: the Peace Democrats,
known to their foes as "Copperheads" because they wore a copper penny
in their lapels as an identifying badge, at one end of the spectrum; and
the Radical Republicans at the other end. The former believed either
that the war could not be won, or that it was not worth winning, and
therefore wanted to give it up. They tended to be opposed particularly
to emancipation, and generally to the increasingly vigorous prosecution
of the war. After the Emancipation Proclamation, some of them went
so far as to encourage soldiers to desert. They were strong especially in
the Midwest, where the "butternut" southern counties of Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois were populated largely by people with Southern connections.
In Indiana, Oliver P. Morton, the Republican governor and
one of the strongest supporters of the war, ran his state for two years
with no legislature, resorting to one political trick after another to keep
his war effort going.
Almost more troublesome to Lincoln than the Peace Democrats were
those extreme members of his own party known as the Radical Republicans.
They were talented, influential, intolerant, and very astute
politically. They had supporters within the gate, as it were, in the
persons of Chase and Stanton in the cabinet itself, but their greatest
power lay in Congress, where Galusha Grow was the Speaker of the
House, and Senators Charles Sumner and Benjamin Wade of Massachusetts,
and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, all were important committee
members. Their most powerful instrument was the
earlier-mentioned Committee on the Conduct of the War, set up to
inquire into early military disasters, and dedicated thenceforth to getting
rid of "soft" generals, notably George McClellan, and promoting
its own faithful, who unfortunately included a number of incompetents,
such as Fremont, Ben Butler, and Fighting Joe Hooker. With
them, military skill was far less important than being correct on the
great political questions of the day, especially abolition. They drew
their strength largely from New England, and over the course of the
war, much of the North grew to resent bitterly what it saw as New
England's dominance of the war effort and policy. The Radical Republicans
would have been a Committee of Public Safety if they could have
managed it, and like Robespierre, they were willing to kill men to
make them free. Lincoln found them very uncomfortable allies, but he
could not do without them, and as the war intensified, he found himself
perforce adopting some of their views. Washington politics, and state
politics as well, given that the states were obviously more important
then than they are now, were thus a constant Scylla and Charybdis act,
with Lincoln and his gubernatorial counterparts trying to preserve their
support in the middle. Still, in comparison to the fog in Richmond,
they did very well.
It was the same with paying for the war. Union finances remained
remarkably sound, though there were temporary embarrassments as a
result of military reverses. In fact, after a poor start, the war forced the
federal government into modernizing its financial and banking system,
and getting rid of the antiquated banking practices that were a legacy
of the Jacksonian era. Before the war began, the federal government
cost about 2 percent of the gross national product; during the war that
cost rose to 15 percent. At first these expenses were covered by shortterm
borrowing, but in late 1861 Congress brought in an income tax,
to be collected starting in 1863, and of course they immediately began
bond issues. The crisis also necessitated the introduction of paper
money on a national level, though before the war the government had
insisted that all its business be transacted in hard currency. The advent
of the greenbacks was in fact a disguised blessing, for in I860 there
had been more than seven thousand different banks circulating their
own paper money throughout the country, and no one could be sure
what a note was worth, as many of those seven thousand had gone
bankrupt in the depression of the late fifties. By 1865 the United States
was well on the way to a national banking system, a necessary precursor
to the enormous national expansion of the next generation. In the matter
of money, as in many other things, the flood of war swept away the
deadwood.
In mid- 1862, Congress introduced a heavy-handed revenue act that
imposed taxes on almost every imaginable product or service, and Congress
also hiked the import duties to protect American manufacturers.
Americans were taxed as they never had been before, though not of
course as they have been in the last fifty years. All of this was considered
at the time to be enormously intrusive on the life of the citizen, but
the war was used as its own excuse for these changes, and it developed
its own momentum. The bond issues, for example, gave the one family
out of every four who subscribed to them a personal financial stake in
winning the war: if it was lost, those bonds would never be redeemed.
The respective success or failure of the two competing governments
is graphically illustrated by the inflation rate. Money is notorious for
its lack of patriotism, so here was an honest yardstick of how well
either side did. In the Union, wartime inflation, from 1861 to 1865,
was about 80 percent, the same as in World War I and slightly higher
than in World War II. In the Confederacy the wartime inflation was
more than 9,000 percent.
Economic historians have differed on the effect of the war on production
in the North. Some point out that if a yardstick several generations
long is employed, the decade of the sixties actually shows a
drop in production, compared with those before and after it. Others
counter that this is misleading, because for the war years, the productive
performance of only the Union is counted, against that for the
entire United States in the preceding and succeeding decades; in other
words, during the war, the Union was producing almost as much as
the entire country before or after the war.
One of the reasons for this is that war, as much as necessity, is the
mother of inventions. It happened that many of the technological advances
that transformed industry and agriculture in the nineteenth
century, gadgets such as sewing machines for both clothes and shoes,
mechanical reapers and harvesters, and machines for canning and preserving
food, had all been developed just before the war. Then the
sudden demand of the war itself brought these machines and processes
to the fore. Ironically, this demand existed at the same time as there
was a labor shortage, because so many men went into the armed services,
so during the war years there was an increase in mechanization,
and in the level of production in the North, and at the same time a
decrease in the skill and aptitude of workers. Far more children were
brought into the workforce, the percentage of unskilled foreign-born
workers increased, and women's share went from a fifth to nearly a
third of the manufacturing population. And this in turn was reflected
in a fall in income for the Northern worker. His, or her, wages went
up but did not keep pace with the inflation rate of the war years, so
while many manufacturers made large amounts of money, they did it
at the expense of the working class. Thus in spite of a graduated income
tax, there was the time-honored phenomenon of the rich getting richer,
while the poor and middle classes not only got to fight the war, they
got to pay for it as well. It truly was a modern war.
One of its unintended effects was to free up a great deal of capital,
through war production, profits, and investment, and also, because of
the absence from the national government of those conservative Southerners
whose presence would have resisted this trend, in allowing far
freer play to those capital forces. The legislative foundations of the
Gilded Age and the great postwar boom period and western expansion
were laid during the war years. In 1862, for example, Congress passed
the Homestead Act; the Morrill Act, which provided for land-grant
colleges in the western territories; and the Pacific Railroad Act, which
culminated after the war in the completion of the transcontinental
railroad. While thousands of young men were fighting the war,
thousands of others were still able to move into manufacturing jobs,
or to move west and take up new land. The economic and geographic
horizons continued to broaden even as the military situation remained
uncertain.
One of the reasons for that uncertainty, aside from the continued
skill and tenacity displayed by the Confederacy, was the matter of
manpower. Just like its opponent, the Union found that men were less
willing to volunteer for war once they had some idea of what it was
like. Given their greater manpower pool, it took the North a year
longer than the South to reach this stage, but by 1863 the issue was
becoming acute. Indeed, in late 1862 volunteering had slowed so significantly
that the federal government resorted to a draft of the state
militias for a nine-month period, which was a thinly disguised form of
conscription. This was but a stopgap measure, however, and in the next
year, in March, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, making every
white male between twenty and forty-five liable for conscription.
As usual, the act was full of loopholes for various categories of men,
and it also allowed the purchase of substitutes. By the time the war
was over, 46,000 men had been drafted, and 118,000 had hired substitutes
to go in their places. The two figures together were less than
10 percent of the total in the Union armies, and the draft has r he re torebeen
considered a failure. The fact was, however, just as in the Con-
federacy, that the conscription acts were designed less for their ostensible
purpose than they were designed to stimulate volunteering. Any
state that could fulfill its quota by volunteering did not have to draft
men, so the relatively small proportion of draftees in fact testified to
the success of the policy in its hidden intent.
This subtlety was lost on many men, and the four draft calls by the
president, the first in July of 1863 and three more in 1864, produced
a great deal of bitterness, as well as real violence. The worst reaction
came with the draft riots in New York City in July 1863.
The largest city of the North was always peculiarly volatile, and
especially so in 1863. It was packed with immigrants and native working-
class people who resented the poor conditions under which they
lived and labored, and the anti-foreign sentiment that was a feature of
the daily lives of the entire populace. Besides that, both the city and
the state were firmly in Democratic hands, and Governor Horatio Seymour
was bitterly opposed to President Lincoln. When the president
issued his draft call, Seymour challenged its constitutionality, almost
openly urging resistance. And when the names of the first draftees,
drawn on Saturday, July 1 1 , were published in the newspapers the next
day, mobs quickly gathered and began parading up and down the
streets of the poorer sections. For three days they were out of control,
and the city cowered under their rampage. The rioters caused a million
and a half dollars' worth of property damage, and worse, they burned
a black orphanage and lynched a number of unfortunate blacks caught
in the wrong place. The city and state authorities responded weakly,
and it was not until the arrival of Federal troops that the mob was
suppressed. The soldiers came right from the battlefield at Gettysburg;
men who had recently been shot at by Longstreet's Rebels had little
sympathy for New York rioters. The soldiers opened fire on the mob,
killing some hundreds, but quickly solving the problem. Under their
iron blue hand, order was soon restored.
New York in the summer of 1863 was only the most famous of
numerous riots throughout the North, at this draft call and others, and
the outbursts illustrate once again the fragility of the coalition Lincoln
and the Republicans had built to support the war. There was one more
opposing force as well, outside the spectrum of legitimate opposition,
and it is best seen in the odd person of Clement L. Vallandigham.
An Ohio lawyer and congressman, Vallandigham was bitterly opposed
to the war, which he believed was, among other evil things, an
abolitionist conspiracy. He was also an outspoken foe of President
Lincoln, and when he was maneuvered out of his congressional seat
by the War Democrats of his own party in 1862, he began a campaign
to win the governorship of Ohio. He stumped the state, speaking
against the war, against conscription, and against Lincoln. All of
this was legitimate, but Vallandigham was a born plotter, one of
those typical men of his day who sought refuge from the advance of
modernity in secret societies, lodge meetings, hidden messages, and
silly handshakes. He was thought incorrectly to be a member of the
Knights of the Golden Circle, the pre-war, largely Southern, secret
society dedicated to the annexation of Mexico and the creation of a
great slave-holding empire around the Caribbean. This group had
numbers of cells, "Castles," in the border and Great Lakes states, and
no one knew—then or now—how many members it had, or how
great a threat it was, or if it was indeed a threat at all. It was certainly
real to some extent, but probably more so in the mind of Edwin
M. Stanton than in objective reality. To the government,
anyway, Copperheads, Knights of the Golden Circle, and Clement
Vallandigham were all of a piece—they were traitors.
Into this volatile mix enter Ambrose Burnside, appointed commander
of the Department of the Ohio after leaving the Army of the
Potomac. Burnside, concerned over possible sedition, issued Order No.
38, making it a crime to speak against the war effort or express sympathy
for the Confederate cause. On April 30, 1863, Vallandigham
made a speech calculated to get himself arrested, and five days later,
Burnside obliged him. Denied the right of habeas corpus, Vallandigham
was tried by a military court and sentenced to two years' imprisonment.
Burnside happily thought he had done a good bit of work.
In fact, he had created a teapot tempest. Vallandigham may well
have been a nuisance, a gadfly, and possibly a fool, but none of those
was really illegal. What was illegal was seizing a civilian and trying
him by military court when martial law had not been proclaimed, and
the government was in a fair way to making Vallandigham the political
martyr he so desperately wanted to be. To keep the man prisoner would
be bad, and to release him might be even worse. Fortunately, there was
Lincoln with his wry sense of humor, and he solved the dilemma.
Vallandigham dearly loved the Confederacy—perfect; President Lincoln
commuted his sentence from imprisonment to banishment. Two
and a half weeks after his military trial, Vallandigham was delivered
under a flag of truce to the Confederate lines in Tennessee, and turned
over by the amused Yankees to the bemused Rebels.
The Democrats professed to be enraged by all this, and in Ohio they
nominated their exiled hero for the governorship. He himself soon
found the Confederacy no more to his taste than the Union, left for
Bermuda, and from there went to Canada, where he took up residence
in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit, to carry on his
absentee political campaign. Most of the country thought it hilarious,
however, that a man who professed to be so opposed to life in the
Union as it then was should be so anxious to return to it. He was
defeated for the governorship by more than 100,000 votes, and in 1864
returned to Ohio in disguise. From then on the government left him
alone, but his fangs were drawn, and for the rest of the war he was
more of an embarrassment to his friends than to his enemies.
So many things were happening in the America of the 1860s that
the times would have been difficult enough even without the war, as
men and women strove to adjust to demographic, economic, technological,
and societal change. The war, of course, submerged all those
things under the more immediate issue of the Union and its survival
or disruption. But they kept burbling up to the surface; the immigrant
ships kept coming into the American ports, families gave up farms and
moved west to take up new land, or were drawn into the cities growing
up along New England's rivers, to the mills and the shoe factories;
poor men rioted against the draft in Wisconsin and New York. It was
all of a piece; the country was changing, and what men at the time
saw as desperation—what at the time was indeed desperation—was
also the ferment of a great new nation being born, a nation that could
fight an immense war, and still grow by leaps and bounds while doing
it. It was exciting—but it was not easy.
World History
