Jim's Mailings

Civil War Politics

It might be proper to look at the politics during the Civil War here in America to see how the High Officials handled their duties, especially the legal aspects. I am transcribing another section of Morrison's history to see if the Prisons maintained by the North and the South lived up to the vaunted American ideals:-
>>>>1. Internal Politics, North and South

Lincoln wielded a greater power throughout the war than any other President of the United States prior to Franklin D. Roosevelt; a wider authority than any British ruler between Cromwell and Churchill. Contemporary accusations against him of tyranny and despotism read strangely to those who know his character, but not to students of his administration. Lincoln came near to being the ideal tyrant of whom Plato dreamed, yet nonetheless he was a dictator from the standpoint of American constitutional law. Jefferson Davis is open to the same charge. And on both sides there were many men of high standing who preferred to risk defeat at the hands of the enemy rather than submit to arbitrary government.

At the beginning of the war, Lincoln as commander in chief of the army and navy called for enlistments not yet sanctioned by Congress, declared a blockade, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus in parts of Maryland. The first assumption of power was quickly made legal by Congress and the second by the Supreme Court; but Chief Justice Taney protested in vain against executive suspension of the famous writ (ex parte Merryman}. Lincoln refused to indulge a meticulous reverence for the Constitution when the Union was crumbling. As he put it in his message of 4 July 1861, "Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" But the power he asserted was grossly abused by some army officers. A loyal mayor of Baltimore, suspected of Southern sympathies, was arrested and confined in a fortress for over a year; a Maryland judge who had charged a grand jury to inquire into illegal acts of government officials was set upon by a provost marshal's guard while his court was in session, beaten, dragged bleeding from the bench, and imprisoned for six months; and there were many like incidents.

Simultaneously with the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln issued an order that seemed to deny white citizens the liberty that he proposed to accord to Negro slaves. He proclaimed that all persons resisting the draft, discouraging enlistment, or "guilty of any disloyal practice affording aid and comfort to rebels" would be subject to martial law, tried by the military, and denied the writ of habeas corpus. Under this proclamation, over 13,000 persons were arrested and confined by military authority, for offenses ranging from theft of government property to treason. Earlier in 1862, and only a few days after he had denounced Lincoln's tyranny, President Davis obtained from his congress the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and promptly did so in Richmond and other places, where equally arbitrary and unjust proceedings occurred.

Undoubtedly the provocation was great, especially in the North, where opposition to the war was open, organized, and active. For instance, the Laconia (New Hampshire) Democrat attacked Lincoln and the war with a virulence equal to that of the most rabid Southern newspaper. This journal urged that Democratic Northern states combine with the Southern, toss out Lincoln with the Constitution, and adopt that of the Confederacy, "rather than submit to have the country divided and ruined to carry out the . . . selfrighteous nigger abstractions of a set of ignorant and hypocritical fanatics of New England." A religious sect, the Osgoodites, regarded the Lincoln administration as the Beast of the Book of Revelation, and sang a hymn beginning, "The Lincoln party made the war, we know."

One of the most delicate and difficult subjects with which both presidents had to deal was the peace movement. Many sincere people on both sides believed that the Union could be restored, or Southern independence established, by negotiation; that only the obstinacy of Lincoln or the ambition of Davis stood in the way of peace. The "copperheads," as the Northern defeatists were called, held a mass meeting in Lincoln's home town on 17 June 1863, which resolved "that a further offensive prosecution of this war tends to subvert the Constitution and the Government." In North Carolina over 100 peace meetings were held within two months after Gettysburg, to promote negotiations for reunion. On both sides the defeatists organized secret societies. In the Middle West "Knights of the Golden Circle" harassed loyal households by midnight raids and barn-burnings; in the South "Heroes of America" gave aid and comfort to the Union. Neither government made any systematic effort to suppress these organizations: they were too formidable. In Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where treason flourished side by side with the most stalwart loyalty, General Burnside attempted repression in 1863 with slight success. In a general order he declared, "The habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed in this department." For violating this order in a campaign speech, the most prominent copperhead, Clement L. Vallandigham, was arrested, tried by a military tribunal, and sentenced to ^ confinement for the duration of the war. Lincoln humorously altered the ^sentence to banishment within the military lines of the Confederacy, whither Vallandigham was escorted in May 1863-1 But it took more than that to

silence Vallandigham. After assuring Jefferson Davis that if the South could hold out another year the Northern Democrats "would sweep the Lincoln dynasty out of political existence," he made his way to Canada, received in absentia the Democratic nomination for governor of Ohio, conducted a peace campaign from Canadian soil, and returned in time to draft the defeatist plank in the Democratic platform of 1864.

After the war was over the Supreme Court took cognizance of a case of arbitrary arrest and court-martial (ex parte Milligan), and declared that neither the Constitution nor any stretch of the President's war powers sanctioned the military trial of a civilian in districts where civil courts were open. This decision came too late to help anybody. Yet, on the whole, defeatists, conscientious objectors, the hostile press, and violent critics of the government, fared better under the Lincoln regime than under those of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Throughout the Civil War active disloyalty was effectively dealt with wherever it raised its head; but there was no general censorship of the press, no "relocation" of suspects; and discussion of leaders and war aims remained open, unrestrained and often ill-informed, libelous, and nasty. Sentences of courts-martial were comparatively mild, and offenders were pardoned with the coming of peace.

In the Confederacy there were no organized political parties, but Vice President Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia came very close to an opposition leader. Endowed with a superior mind, Stephens made several wise statements about the war; but in his loyalty to political abstractions he resembled John Randolph of Roanoke, and his thin body, falsetto voice, and waspish speech suggested that he suffered under a similar disability. Stephens hated the war, hated Davis, and hated Richmond, so much so that he absented himself for 18 months from his official post as president of the senate. Stephens conducted a campaign against the government for subverting the liberty it was supposed to protect, and encouraged state governors to resist conscription. This sniping campaign was directed by Linton Stephens, a member of the Georgia house of representatives, who went so far as to write to his brother in October 1863 that President Davis was "a little conceited, hypocritical, sniveling, canting, malicious, ambitious, dogged knave and fool." The Stephenses worked hand-in-glove with Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, who obstructed the Confederate conscription laws in many ways and by 1864 had brought his state to a mental condition akin to open revolt. Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, the original secessionist, even planned a convention of the states to depose Davis.

Governor Zebulon B. Vance of North Carolina was another sharp thorn in Davis's side. He not only withheld troops from the Confederate service but did his best to retain for the North Carolina regiments all the uniforms manufactured in his state, and to take the pick of all supplies that entered Wilmington through the blockade. He had a bitter controversy with Davis over C.S.S. Tallahassee, a converted blockade runner which slipped in and

out of Wilmington in 1864 to destroy merchant vessels. On one of her visits to her home port, the captain of Tallahassee filled his bunkers with steam coal which Vance wanted for a state-owned blockade runner. Vance accused Davis of hamstringing operations which would have relieved his people of their misery, in order to fuel a Confederate raider that only destroyed "a few smacks." Davis, when the Confederacy was on its last legs, had to report this silly controversy to the Confederate congress, and explain that the "insignificant smacks" were forty-six ships, nineteen of them square-rigged.

General Bragg, a few other Confederate commanders, and the governor of Texas, declared martial law in 1862, but President Davis revoked these orders as unwarranted assumptions of power. Nevertheless provost marshals infested the South, demanding passports, credentials, and loyalty oaths from all who excited their attention or suspicion. A more general subject of Southern discontent was the impressment of supplies for the army by the commissary department, when farmers refused to sell for Confederate money. This practice stripped many a Southern farm of corn and livestock; then Sherman's "bummers" came along and took the poultry too.

In the face of frequent, acrid, and unreasonable attacks, Davis maintained an admirable patience. He could be acid and querulous when commenting on Union acts and policies; but to his own people, no matter how great the provocation, he was always the high-minded, courteous gentleman.

1 Vallandigham's declaration that "he did not want to belong to the United States" prompted Edward Everett Hale to write The Man Without a Country. This piece of fiction, which appeared in the Atlantic in December 1863, was widely republished, and did more to stimulate patriotism than any other wartime writing.<<<
You did not find Andersonville or other Southern Military Prisons discussed here, or equally squalid prisons maintained by the Union Armies. We will leave that research up to you.

posted by James E. Opfell @ 8:45 PM