Lincoln Part 41

Lincoln felt he had no alternative but to rescind his order, endorsing it "Withdrawn, because considered harsh by Gen. Halleck." Heading an administration which he had barely saved from collapse, after the two princ.i.p.al members had offered their resignations and others had been prepared to follow, and facing the likelihood of a change of command in the almost mutinous Army of the Potomac, the President could not permit further evidence of dissension among his advisers. But it was not a decision that he made readily, and in the future he spoke of Halleck as little more than "a first-rate clerk."

It was harder to know what to do with Burnside. Lincoln was always reluctant to dismiss a faithful subordinate, however unsuccessful; perhaps the President remembered that at times he himself had seemed to most people a failure. He genuinely liked Burnside's modesty and loyalty. While recognizing the general's limitations, he admired his fighting spirit, and he respected the "consummate skill and success with which [he] crossed and re-crossed the river, in face of the enemy." He tended to distrust the generals critical of Burnside, suspecting they were McClellan partisans. Anyway, there was no obvious successor to Burnside, and Lincoln wrote him candidly: "I do not yet see how I could profit by changing the command of the A[rmy of the] P[otomac]."

The general was given one more chance. With Halleck's blessing he planned to cross the Rappahannock west of Fredericksburg, hoping to flank Lee's army. Lincoln approved the advance but instructed the general, "Be cautious, and do not understand that the government, or country, is driving you." On January 19 the Army of the Potomac lumbered out of camp on a mission that most of Burnside's division commanders felt was doomed to failure. The weather reinforced their objections. As heavy rain turned to sleet, the army bogged down, and after three days Burnside called off what reporters scornfully called the "Mud March."

Back in camp Burnside boiled over. Blaming the failure on the disloyalty of his subordinates, he drafted an order dismissing four of his major generals from the army and relieving four other generals from their commands. Taking the order to Was.h.i.+ngton, he told Lincoln he could not continue in command unless the order was approved. "I think you are right," Lincoln said, but he reserved a decision until he could talk with Stanton and Halleck. The next morning, when Burnside returned to the White House, Lincoln told him he was to be replaced as commander of the Army of the Potomac.

The President had difficulty in choosing a successor. Despite considerable public pressure, he gave no thought to restoring McClellan to command. He could have brought in either Rosecrans or Grant, though neither had yet been notably successful, but to impose a Western commander would have been insulting to the Army of the Potomac. Of Burnside's subordinates, E. V. Sumner was too old, Franklin and Smith were thought to be McClellan partisans, and others had yet to prove they could command a huge army.

Rather uncertainly Lincoln turned to Joseph Hooker. The general had some decided negatives. He was known to be a hard drinker. He had been outspoken almost to the point of insubordination in his criticisms of Burnside's incompetence, and he let it be known that he viewed the President and the government at Was.h.i.+ngton as "imbecile and 'played out.'" "Nothing would go right," he told a newspaper reporter, "until we had a dictator, and the sooner the better." But the handsome, florid-faced general had performed valiantly in nearly all the major engagements of the Peninsula campaign and at Antietam, where he had been wounded, and his aggressive spirit earned him the sobriquet "Fighting Joe." Lincoln decided to take a chance on him.

Calling Hooker to the White House, he gave the general a carefully composed private letter, which commended his bravery, his military skill, and his confidence in himself. At the same time, he told Hooker, "there are some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you." He lamented Hooker's efforts to undermine confidence in Burnside and mentioned his "recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator." "Of course," he continued, "it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command." "Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators," he reminded the new commander. "What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictators.h.i.+p." Promising the full support of the government, he warned, "Beware of rashness."

The appointment of Hooker, which was generally well received in the North, relieved some of the immediate pressure on the President. Everybody understood that the new commander would require some time to reorganize the Army of the Potomac and to raise the spirits of the demoralized soldiers. The President could, for the moment, turn his attention to other problems.

II

Foreign relations did not occupy a great deal of Lincoln's time. For the most part, he was content to allow the Secretary of State to manage diplomatic affairs-just as he permitted the other cabinet members to conduct the business of their departments with minimal interference. He trusted Seward, and he respected the Secretary's knowledge of diplomatic protocol.

With most nations the relations of the United States were entirely amicable, and there were few occasions that called for special exertions by either the Secretary of State or the President. No doubt Lincoln derived some amus.e.m.e.nt from his correspondence with the King of Siam, who, as a token of his goodwill and friends.h.i.+p for the American people in their present struggle, sent gifts of a photograph of himself, a sword and a scabbard, and a pair of elephant tusks, and offered to supply to the government a stock of breeding elephants. "Our political jurisdiction," the President replied, in words probably drafted by Seward, "does not reach a lat.i.tude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce."

From time to time, the eccentric or unauthorized behavior of American diplomats caused minor ripples, as when Theodore Canisius, once Lincoln's partner in the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger and now American consul to Vienna, initiated, quite on his own, negotiations to offer a command in the Union armies to the great Italian general Garibaldi. Somewhat more serious was the game of musical chairs played with the American ministry to St. Petersburg. The post went first to Ca.s.sius M. Clay, the Kentucky abolitionist, as a reward for his strong support for Lincoln in the Chicago nominating convention of 1860. Despite several street brawls, in which Clay demonstrated to startled Russian challengers the merits of the bowie knife, the minister grew bored and sought a more active life in the Union army. Lincoln replaced him with Simon Cameron, thinking St. Petersburg an excellent place to remove his first Secretary of War from the hands of his congressional investigators, hot on the scent of fraud and scandal. Cameron lasted only long enough to present his credentials to the Czar and then asked for a furlough so that he could come back to Pennsylvania and run for the Senate. Meanwhile Clay proved noisy, importunate, and time-consuming with his constant advice to the President on how to conduct all aspects of the war, and Lincoln decided the Union cause would benefit by sending him back to Russia. The Czar was graciously understanding, for his government throughout the war was staunchly pro-Union, and it repeatedly discouraged all suggestions of European intervention in the American conflict.

Much more sensitive were relations with Great Britain and France, the two powers with major interests at stake in the American conflict. In neither was the government particularly favorable to the Union cause, and in both the upper levels of society looked with scorn combined with fear at the democracy of the North and fancied a kins.h.i.+p to the slaveholding oligarchy of the South. The Union blockade, which cut off the export of Southern cotton, produced real suffering in the textile-manufacturing regions of both Britain and France. s.h.i.+pbuilders in France and especially in Britain saw the possibility of huge profits in outfitting vessels for the Confederate navy. With so much at stake, the two great powers had early moved to issue proclamations of neutrality, which recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent (though not as an independent nation); these had doubtless been proper, even necessary, under international law, but the actions had struck the Lincoln government as precipitate. British willingness to go to the brink of war over the Trent affair had offered further evidence that the American Civil War could be easily transformed into an international conflict. And the decision of the Emperor Napoleon III to send French troops to Mexico, in order to bolster the shaky regime of his puppet-king Maximilian, was a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine and to the Union government.

Holding firmly to his axiom "One war at a time," Lincoln allowed Seward to manage the day-to-day relations with the two great powers but when there was a crisis used his personal authority to preserve peace. For instance, early in 1863 when Union blockaders captured the Peterhoff, a British-owned merchant s.h.i.+p carrying goods to Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, the British protested this violation of international law, while Secretary Welles defended the navy, claiming the Peterhoff was carrying contraband intended for the Confederacy. The mails aboard the Peterhoff posed a specially touchy issue, because they might prove the vessel was really a blockade-runner. The British, whose position was strongly backed by Seward, insisted that under international law mails were inviolate, while Welles, whose views were endorsed by Sumner, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that only the courts could decide whether they had been lawfully seized. This controversy, which was in reality a minor affair though it had the potential for becoming an explosive issue, occupied much of the time of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy until the middle of May, and Lincoln gave respectful hearing to both sides. In the end, the President sided with Seward and released the mails, reminding his cabinet members that "we were in no condition to plunge into a foreign war on a subject of so little importance in comparison with the terrible consequences which must follow our act."

Lincoln demonstrated the same caution in dealing with the larger issues of international relations. It was perhaps well that neither he nor Seward realized how close Great Britain and France came to intervening in the American conflict in the summer and fall of 1862, when a long succession of Confederate victories seemed to prove W. E. Gladstone's a.s.sertion that Jefferson Davis had made a nation of the Confederacy. Economic hards.h.i.+p, disruption in the patterns of trade, and unwillingness to see a debilitating conflict further protracted moved Napoleon to suggest joint intervention to the British government, and both Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, and Earl Russell, the Foreign Secretary, looked favorably on the French plan. Only after an angry debate in the British cabinet, in which defenders of the Union were strengthened by the news of McClellan's success at Antietam and of Lincoln's Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, was intervention rejected.

Was.h.i.+ngton knew of these ominous developments only through rumor, and Lincoln was not, of course, obliged to take any official notice of them. But in early 1863 he could not ignore another scheme for foreign intervention in the war. Horace Greeley, the unpredictable editor of the New York Tribune, concluding that the war was hopeless, announced in his influential editorials that the North was ready to restore "the Union as it was." That was tantamount to saying that the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, which the editor had so vigorously urged on the President, should be dropped and that mediation by England, France, or even Switzerland, if offered "in a conciliatory spirit," would be welcomed. Greeley had come under the influence of an unstable mining speculator, William Cornell ("Colorado") Jewett, just back from France with a mediation proposal from Napoleon III, and, flushed with enthusiasm, the editor dashed off to Was.h.i.+ngton to enlist the French minister, Henri Mercier, in his cause. He found the President noncommittal, and Charles Sumner, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said that the Union armies needed another chance for victory. But Greeley was not discouraged, and he told his fellow editor, Henry J. Raymond, of the New York Times, that he intended to bring the war to a close by mediation. When Raymond asked what the President had to say about his scheme, he replied: "You'll see ... that I'll drive Lincoln into it."

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 s.h.i.+pping magnate John Murray Forbes and the railroad tyc.o.o.n 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 surpa.s.sed 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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.

III

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 a.s.sault they launched upon the Lincoln administration. In December, on the first day of the session, Representative S. S. ("Sunset") c.o.x 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 Const.i.tution 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 Emanc.i.p.ation 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 const.i.tutional. But many other Democrats throughout the country, weary of the bloodshed, were ready to end the war through negotiation and compromise. At a ma.s.s 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 18621863, the Lincoln administration put its weight behind a new conscription act, signed by the President on March 3. It promised further hards.h.i.+p 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 ca.n.a.l 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 Emanc.i.p.ation 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sociate 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" a.s.sembled 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 emanc.i.p.ation. 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 ma.s.s 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 unconst.i.tutional, 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 Emanc.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sed along their fears to the President. John A. McClernand, a st.u.r.dy 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 Emanc.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sed. 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.

The administration employed the new conscription law not merely to raise troops but to suppress dissent. Lincoln named Colonel James B. Fry provost marshal, and a.s.sistant provost marshals were a.s.signed to each state, where they worked closely with the governors. Their primary duty was to enroll soldiers, but if they encountered opposition, as they did in many parts of the West, they promptly jailed the disaffected, invoking Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to deny them trial. Newspapers that attacked the government too vigorously or tried to discourage enlistments were suppressed, sometimes for a single issue, sometimes for a longer period.

Lincoln had the bad judgment to put Ambrose E. Burnside in charge of his effort to keep the West loyal to the Union. Fresh from his defeat at Fredericksburg, Burnside, as commander of the Department of the Ohio, was determined that no carelessness or oversight on his part should lead to further disaster, and he energetically fought what he considered "treason, expressed or implied." On April 13 he issued General Order No. 38 announcing that anyone who committed "acts for the benefit of the enemies of our country" would be arrested and tried as a spy or traitor. The order specifically prohibited "the habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy."

Vallandigham, the leading Peace Democrat in the West, resolved to test this order, which clearly violated the const.i.tutional guarantee of freedom of speech, and on May 1 he made a bitter, rousing address at Mount Vernon, Ohio, denouncing Burnside's order as a base usurpation of tyrannical power. He attacked the President as "King Lincoln," who was waging war for the liberation of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites. Four days later Burnside had him arrested, and a military commission promptly found him guilty of "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." The former congressman was sentenced to close confinement in a United States fortress for the duration of the war.

Vallandigham's arrest and trial posed a dangerous problem for Lincoln. His instinctive judgment was to sustain the action of his subordinate in the field. Burnside had sent a copy of his Order No. 38 to Was.h.i.+ngton, and neither Halleck nor the President disapproved of it. After all, the general was acting under the authority of the President's own proclamation of September 24, 1862, suspending the writ of habeas corpus. That authority was further strengthened by a recent act of Congress, which-depending on the legislator's interpretation-either granted the President authority to suspend the great writ or affirmed that he already had the authority. Accordingly, on May 8, Lincoln telegraphed Burnside his "kind a.s.surance of support" in the Vallandigham arrest.

On reflection, he came to view the arrest in another light. All the cabinet regretted the necessity of arresting Vallandigham, and some doubted that there really was a necessity. Gideon Welles judged bluntly: "It was an error on the part of Burnside." Within the administration there was unhappiness that the ex-congressman had been tried before a military tribunal, even though the civil courts in Ohio were available. David Davis, now a justice of the Supreme Court, repeatedly hammered on the theme that military trials in these circ.u.mstances were unconst.i.tutional and wrong, and he capitalized on the President's own known opposition to such military tribunals. As Halleck wrote Burnside, "in the loyal States like Ohio it is best to interfere with the ordinary civil tribunals as little as possible." Others regretted that Vallandigham had been sentenced to imprisonment, rather than to banishment to the Confederate lines.

The dismay over Burnside's actions within the administration was nothing when compared to the furor of anger the arrest of Vallandigham roused in the country. The rabidly Democratic New York Atlas set the tone by declaring that "the tyranny of military despotism" exhibited in the arrest of Vallandigham demonstrated "the weakness, folly, oppression, mismanagement and general wickedness of the administration at Was.h.i.+ngton." At a huge rally in New York City one speaker a.s.serted that if Vallandigham's arrest went unrebuked, "free speech dies, and with it our liberty, the const.i.tution and our country." Another pointedly reminded the President that Vallandigham's speech was not nearly so strong as Lincoln's own denunciation of President Polk in the Mexican War. Still another shouted that "the man who occupied the Presidential chair at Was.h.i.+ngton was tenfold a greater traitor to the country than was any Southern rebel." Across the country newspapers, many of unquestioned loyalty, a.s.sailed the arrest of Vallandigham and joined the New York Herald in fearing that it was only the first of "a series of fatal steps which must terminate at last in b.l.o.o.d.y anarchy."

Bowing to pressure, Lincoln on May 19, against the advice of General Burnside, commuted Vallandigham's sentence and ordered that the ex-congressman be exiled to the Confederacy.

The Vallandigham affair had a chastening effect on Lincoln. On June 1, when Burnside ordered the strongly antiwar Chicago Times suspended, the President immediately overruled him. Though the paper, edited by Wilbur F. Storey, had strongly condemned the administration's emanc.i.p.ation policy as "a monstrous usurpation, a criminal wrong, and an act of national suicide" and said the President was sacrificing soldiers' lives without cause, Lincoln said the irritation produced by suppressing the newspaper would do more harm than its publication.

But the damage resulting from the Vallandigham case was too extensive to be erased. Ohio Democrats showed what they thought of the President by nominating Vallandigham for governor though he was still in exile. More important, the episode had a profound effect on the War Democrats. Their most prominent spokesman, Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, denounced the arrest as an offense "against our most sacred rights" and warned that the administration was moving toward revolution and military despotism.