Lincoln (84 page)

Greeley’s attempt at peacemaking was so heavy-handed that Seward threatened to prosecute him under the Logan Act, which prohibited American citizens from negotiating with foreign representatives. Lincoln joked that the editor, had probably done more “to aid in the successful prosecution of the war than he could have done in any other way,” because his overearnest advocacy of peace had, “on the principles of antagonism, made the opposition urge on the war.” Certainly Greeley’s activities did much to blunt the impact of the formal proposal made by Napoleon’s government suggesting
that the Union and the Confederacy appoint delegates to meet at some neutral place to explore the possibilities of reunion or permanent division of the United States. With Lincoln’s entire approval, Seward promptly rejected the proposal. Virtually all American newspapers commended the government’s course, and the often critical
New York Herald
praised not merely “the masterly diplomacy of our sagacious Secretary of State” but also Lincoln’s “sagacity, consistency and steadiness of purpose” in sustaining him.

The mediation crisis alerted the President to the importance of influencing public opinion abroad in favor of the Union cause. Charles Francis Adams, the American minister to the Court of St. James’s, and William L. Dayton, the minister to France, were both doing excellent work, but their scope was necessarily restricted by their official positions and duties. To reach a wider public in Great Britain and France, Lincoln’s administration encouraged informal missions by American businessmen like the shipping magnate John Murray Forbes and the railroad tycoon William H. Aspinwall, by clergymen like Catholic Archbishop John J. Hughes and Episcopal Bishop Charles P. Mcllvaine, and by worldly-wise politicians like Thurlow Weed, who could explain and defend their government’s actions.

At the same time, Lincoln himself began a campaign to win popular support in Great Britain, where, with some hidden subvention from American funds, numerous public meetings were held to voice support for the Union cause and especially for the emancipation of the slaves. With the help of Charles Sumner, the American who had perhaps the widest circle of acquaintances abroad, the President drafted shrewdly crafted messages to the workingmen of Manchester and London voicing sympathy for their suffering in unemployment and skillfully blaming the cotton shortage not on the Union blockade of the South but on “the actions of our disloyal citizens.” Lavishly he praised the ardent Unionism of British workingmen, whose self-interest would have dictated support of the Confederacy. They offered, the President said, “an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.”

In these messages to British workingmen Lincoln oversimplified the complex American struggle. Ignoring the fact that his government had for nearly two years firmly refused to make emancipation a Union war aim, he now claimed that the conflict was a test “whether a government, established on the principles of human freedom, can be maintained against an effort to build one upon the exclusive foundation of human bondage.” Once the American Civil War was so understood, he was convinced that there could be no doubt where British sympathies would lie. In the hope of putting the issue even more forcefully, he drafted a statement that he asked Sumner to present to British friends of the Union, pointing out that the fundamental objective of the rebellion was “to maintain, enlarge, and perpetuate human slavery,” and resolving that “no such embryo State [such as the Confederacy] should ever be recognized by, or admitted into, the family of christian and civilized nations.”

The effectiveness of the President’s personal propaganda warfare could not be measured, for it was not so much public statements or popular rallies as the internal dynamics of British and French politics, plus fears of ultimate American reprisal, that determined a course of neutrality for the two major European powers. But for Lincoln the opportunity to use the White House as a pulpit, to speak out over the dissonant voices of foreign leaders to the common people, daringly broadened the powers of the Presidency. It was a practice he could in the future use to good effect at home.

Greeley was not alone in advocating mediation by foreign powers. Heartened by their successes in the recent fall elections, Democrats made mediation by the French Emperor part of the broad assault they launched upon the Lincoln administration. In December, on the first day of the session, Representative S. S. (“Sunset”) Cox of Ohio began the attack with a resolution demanding the immediate release of all political prisoners and charging that arbitrary arrests were “unwarranted by the Constitution and laws of the United States, and... a usurpation of power never given up by the people to their rulers.” In January, as the military situation deteriorated, Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware, whose dark, scowling face made him look like a chained mastiff, lamented that the President treated the abridgment of civil liberties “with jocular and criminal indifference,” and he warned that the recently issued final Emancipation Proclamation “would light their author to dishonor through all future generations.” More important was the full-scale address Representative Clement L. Vallandigham made on January 14 in the House of Representatives. Handsome, plausible, and articulate, the Ohio congressman denounced Lincoln’s effort to restore the Union by war as an “utter, disastrous, and most bloody failure.” Claiming that the President by “repeated and persistent arbitrary arrests, the suspension of
habeas corpus,
the violation of freedom of the mails, of the private house, of the press and of speech, and all the other multiplied wrongs and outrages upon public liberty and private right” had converted the United States into “one of the worst despotisms on earth,” Vallandigham sought the intervention of a friendly foreign power to bring about “an informal, practical recognition” of the Confederacy.

Vallandigham did not speak for the entire Democratic party. War Democrats, who consistently supported Lincoln’s efforts to subdue the Confederacy, sustained his administration in all measures they considered constitutional. But many other Democrats throughout the country, weary of the bloodshed, were ready to end the war through negotiation and compromise. At a mass meeting in New York City, for instance, the former mayor, the unsavory and duplicitous Fernando Wood, spoke for these Peace Democrats when he urged the President to cease hostilities, call a conference with
the Confederates, and “restore the Union without further loss of blood.” Extreme opponents of the administration favored peace at any price; some favored subverting the Lincoln administration and a few of these were in contact with Southern authorities. Republicans called them “Copperheads,” probably after the poisonous snake that attacks without notice.

Discontent was strongest and most dangerous in the Middle West. When the war broke out, Westerners had quickly rallied to the colors, and these recruits made up the powerful Union armies that operated in the Mississippi Valley. They had suffered uncounted losses during the first two years of the war, and many were growing angry and disillusioned. After volunteering almost stopped during the winter of 1862–1863, the Lincoln administration put its weight behind a new conscription act, signed by the President on March 3. It promised further hardship for Western farms and families.

Western dissatisfaction was the greater because that region had only imperfectly shared in the general prosperity that the war brought to the North. As long as the Confederacy controlled the Mississippi River, the main Western trade outlet was blocked, and Westerners were forced to pay prohibitively high freight rates to send their produce east by canal and rail. At the same time, Republican tariff legislation protected Northeastern manufacturers at the expense of Western consumers.

But the greatest cause of disaffection in the West was Lincoln’s emancipation policy. Few Westerners were abolitionists. Those who had joined the Republican party in the 1850s were, like Lincoln himself, more concerned with the expansion of slavery into the national territories than with its eradication. A considerable majority of Westerners, especially those in the lower parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where ties of family and commerce to the South were strong, were Democrats of the Stephen A. Douglas stripe, devoted to the preservation of the Union but indifferent to the future of slavery. For these, the Emancipation Proclamation changed the character of the war. Democratic leaders in the Western states now told their followers: “We told you so. The war is solely an abolition war. We are for putting down Rebellion, but not for making it an anti-slavery crusade!”

Fear that emancipation would lead to a heavy immigration of freedmen from the South strengthened Western hostility toward the administration. “Ohio,” it was predicted, “will be overrun with negroes, they will compete with you and bring down your wages,
you
will have to work with them, eat with them, your
wives
and
children
must associate with theirs and you and your families will be degraded to their level.” This fear was not wholly irrational; Stanton in September had ordered the “contrabands” assembled at Cairo, Illinois, sent north to replace farm laborers who had joined the army. Anxiety on this subject was pervasive enough that Lincoln felt obliged to devote several pages of his December 1862 message to Congress to refuting this “largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious” objection to emancipation. Cleverly he tried to turn it into an argument for the colonization
of the freedmen “in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race.” But Westerners were not convinced and many believed that the effect of the President’s emancipation policy would be to establish Negro equality.

In the West discontent manifested itself in sporadic outbreaks of violence. In several counties there was resistance to the arrest of deserters from the Union armies; on occasion Union men or soldiers at home on furlough were murdered; there were demonstrations and armed parades against continuing the war. Ugly racism was often evident in these outbreaks. In a Detroit race riot many blacks were beaten and some thirty-five houses were burned.

Numerous mass meetings and county conventions announced “that the Union can never be restored by force of arms,” protested the conversion of the war into an abolition crusade, challenged the impending conscription legislation as unconstitutional, and called for a cease-fire. Many of these meetings favored summoning a national convention, to be held at Louisville on the first Tuesday in April, in order “to obtain an armistice and cessation of hostilities.” So strong was antiwar sentiment that the
Times
of London believed that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had “proved a solvent which has loosened the federal bond in the North itself” and predicted the imminent secession of the Western states from what remained of the Union.

Many Western Unionists shared that foreboding, and they passed along their fears to the President. John A. McClernand, a sturdy Illinois Democrat, warned the President of “the rising storm in the Middle and Northwestern States,” and predicted “not only a separation from the New England States but reunion of the Middle and Northwestern States with the revolted States.” Republicans were even more alarmed, finding “Treason... everywhere bold, defiant—and active,
with impunity!”
In Illinois the Democratic majority in the state legislature insisted that the Union could not be restored unless Lincoln withdrew the Emancipation Proclamation and urged him to declare an armistice; they also tried to appoint delegates to the Louisville peace convention, to block arbitrary arrests, and to prohibit the immigration of blacks into the state. Republican Governor Richard Yates felt obliged to prorogue the legislature, for the first time in history, and to rule without legislative authorization. Similarly in Indiana the Democrats who controlled the legislature threatened to take over control of the state’s military efforts; they were blocked only when the Republican members, bolting the chamber to prevent a quorum, brought about adjournment before any appropriations bills could be passed. For the next two years Republican Governor Oliver P. Morton governed the state without legislative authorization. Both governors attributed Democratic obduracy to secret, pro-Confederate organizations, especially the Knights of the Golden Circle, which were allegedly fomenting disloyalty throughout the West.

Lincoln credited these reports of discontents and conspiracies. Governor
Yates, whom he had known for many years, had his entire confidence, but he was not quite so ready to believe Morton, who, he said, was “at times ... the skeeredest man I know of.” When the governor urged him to meet him in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to confer on the crisis, Lincoln refused, because the absence of both the President of the United States and the Governor of Indiana from their respective capitals would be “misconstrued a thousand ways.” Nevertheless, he read attentively Morton’s long report, drafted by the reformer Robert Dale Owen, detailing the activities of secret peace societies in the West and revealing the Democratic plan to end the war, recognize the Confederacy, and organize a new nation with the New England states left out. All such news the President found exceedingly troubling. He never realized that most of the supposedly disloyal agitation in the West was less an expression of hostility to the Union or the war than to the Republican party. Deeply worried, he confided to Charles Sumner that he now feared “‘the fire in the rear’—meaning the Democracy especially at the North West—more than our military chances.”

Promptly his administration moved to support the loyal Republican regimes in the West and to stamp out disaffection and discontent. In January, Yates informed him that it was imperative to have four well-armed regiments stationed in Illinois in order to keep an eye on the legislature and disperse it if necessary, and the President promptly endorsed the proposal. When Morton, who was trying to govern in the absence of the state legislature, ran out of money, Stanton was able to find $250,000 for him in the budget of the Union War Department.