13: The Plebiscite of 1864
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Every great revolution among Anglo-Saxon people—perhaps among
all people—has produced strange types of dreamers. In America,
however, neither section could claim a monopoly of such types,
and even the latter-day visionaries who can see everything in
heaven and earth, excepting fact, had their Northern and Southern
originals in the time of the great American war. Among these is
a strange congregation which assembled in the spring of 1864 and
which has come to be known, from its place of meeting, as the
Cleveland Convention. Its coming together was the result of a
loose cooperation among several minor political groups, all of
which were for the Union and the war, and violently opposed to
Lincoln. So far as they had a common purpose, it was to supplant
Lincoln by Fremont in the next election.
The Convention was notable for the large proportion of agnostics
among its members. A motion was made to amend a resolution that
"the Rebellion must be put down" by adding the words "with God's
assistance." This touch of piety was stormily rejected. Another
group represented at Cleveland was made up of extreme
abolitionists under the leadership of that brilliant but
disordered genius, Wendell Phillips. He sent a letter denouncing
Lincoln and pledging his support of Fremont because of the
latter's "clearsighted statesmanship and rare military ability."
The convention declared itself a political party, under the style
of the Radical Democracy, and nominated Fremont for President.
There was another body of dreamers, still more singular, who were
also bitter opponents of Lincoln. They were, however, not in
favor of war. Their political machinery consisted of secret
societies. As early as 1860, the Knights of the Golden Circle
were active in Indiana, where they did yeoman service for
Breckinridge. Later this society acquired some underground
influence in other States, especially in Ohio, and did its share
in bringing about the victories at the polls in the autumn of
1862, when the Democrats captured the Indiana legislature.
The most serious charge against the Golden Circle was complicity
in an attempt to assassinate Oliver P. Morton, Governor of
Indiana, who was fired at, one night, as he was leaving the state
house. When Morton demanded an investigation of the Golden
Circle, the legislature refused to sanction it. On his own
authority and with Federal aid he made investigations and
published a report which, if it did not actually prove treason,
came dangerously near to proof. Thereafter, this society drops
out of sight, and its members appear to have formed the new Order
of the American Knights, which in its turn was eclipsed by the
Sons of Liberty. There were several other such societies all
organized on a military plan and with a great pretense of arming
their members. This, however, had to be done surreptitiously.
Boxes of rifles purchased in the East were shipped West labeled
"Sunday-school books," and negotiations were even undertaken with
the Confederacy to bring in arms by way of Canada. At a meeting
of the supreme council of the Sons of Liberty, in New York,
February 22, 1864, it was claimed that the order had nearly a
million members, though the Government secret service considered
half a million a more exact estimate.
As events subsequently proved, the societies were not as
formidable as these figures would imply. Most of the men who
joined them seem to have been fanciful creatures who loved
secrecy for its own sake. While real men, North and South, were
laying down their lives for their principles, these make-believe
men were holding bombastic initiations and taking oaths such as
this from the ritual of the American Knights: "I do further
solemnly promise and swear, that I will ever cherish the sublime
lessons which the sacred emblems of our order suggest, and will,
so far as in me lies, impart those lessons to the people of the
earth, where the mystic acorn falls from its parent bough, in
whose visible firmament Orion, Arcturus, and the Pleiades ride in
their cold resplendent glories, and where the Southern Cross
dazzles the eye of degraded humanity with its coruscations of
golden light, fit emblem of Truth, while it invites our sacred
order to consecrate her temples in the four corners of the earth,
where moral darkness reigns and despotism holds sway.... Divine
essence, so help me that I fail not in my troth, lest I shall be
summoned before the tribunal of the order, adjudged and condemned
to certain and shameful death, while my name shall be recorded on
the rolls of infamy. Amen."
The secret orders fought hard to prevent the Lincoln victory in
the elections of 1863. Even before that time their leaders had
talked mysteriously of another disruption of the Union and the
formation of a Northwestern Confederacy in alliance with the
South. The scheme was known to the Confederates, allusions to it
are to be found in Southern newspapers, and even the Confederate
military authorities considered it. Early in 1863, General
Beauregard thought the Confederates might "get into Ohio and call
upon the friends of Vallandigham to rise for his defense and
support; then...call upon the whole Northwest to join in the
movement, form a confederacy of their own, and join us by a
treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive." Reliance on the
support of the societies was the will-o'-the-wisp that deceived
General John Morgan in his desperate attempt to carry out
Beauregard's programme. Though brushed aside as a mere detail by
military historians, Morgan's raid, with his force of irregular
cavalry, in July, 1863, through Indiana and Ohio, was one of the
most romantic episodes of the war. But it ended in his defeat
and capture. While his gallant troopers rode to their
destruction, the men who loved to swear by Arcturus and to gabble
about the Pleiades showed the fiber to be expected of such
people, and stayed snug in their beds.
But neither their own lack of hardihood nor the disasters of
their Southern friends could dampen their peculiar ardor. Their
hero was Vallandigham. That redoubtable person had fixed his
headquarters in Canada, whence he directed his partisans in their
vain attempt to elect him Governor of Ohio. Their next move was
to honor him with the office of Supreme Commander of the Sons of
Liberty, and now Vallandigham resolved to win the martyr's crown
in very fact. In June, 1864, he prepared for the dramatic effect
by carefully advertising his intention and came home. But to his
great disappointment Lincoln ignored him, and the dramatic
martyrdom which he had planned did not come off.
There still existed the possibility of a great uprising, and to
that end arrangements were made with Southern agents in Canada.
Confederate soldiers, picked men, made their way in disguise to
Chicago. There the worshipers of Arcturus were to join them in a
mighty multitude; the Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas in
Chicago were to be liberated; around that core of veterans, the
hosts of the Pleiades were to rally. All this was to coincide
with the assembling at Chicago of the Democratic national
convention, in which Vallandigham was to appear. The organizers
of the conspiracy dreamed that the two events might coalesce;
that the convention might be stampeded by their uprising; that a
great part, if not the whole, of the convention would endorse the
establishment of a Northwestern Confederacy.
Alas for him who builds on the frame of mind that delights in
cheap rhetoric while Rome is afire! At the moment of hazard, the
Sons of Liberty showed the white feather, were full of specious
words, would not act. The Confederate soldiers, indignant at
this second betrayal, had to make their escape from the country.
It must not be supposed that this Democratic national convention
was made up altogether of Secessionists. The peace party was
still, as in the previous year, a strange complex, a mixture of
all sorts and conditions. Its cohesion was not so much due to
its love of peace as to its dislike of Lincoln and its hatred of
his party. Vallandigham was a member of the committee on
resolutions. The permanent chairman was Governor Seymour of New
York. The Convention was called to order by August Belmont, a
foreigner by birth, the American representative of the
Rothschilds. He was the head and front of that body of Northern
capital which had so long financed the South and which had always
opposed the war. In opening the Convention he said: "Four years
of misrule by a sectional, fanatical, and corrupt party have
brought our country to the verge of ruin." In the platform
Lincoln was accused of a list of crimes which it had become the
habit of the peace party to charge against him. His
administration was described as "four years of failure," and
McClellan was nominated for President.
The Republican managers called a convention at Baltimore in June,
1864, with a view to organizing a composite Union Party in which
the War Democrats were to participate. Their plan was
successful. The second place on the Union ticket was accepted by
a War Democrat, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee. Lincoln was
renominated, though not without opposition, and he was so keenly
aware that he was not the unanimous choice of the Union Party
that he permitted the fact to appear in a public utterance soon
afterward. "I do not allow myself," he said, in addressing a
delegation of the National Union League, "to suppose that either
the Convention or the League have concluded to decide that I am
either the greatest or the best man in America, but rather they
have concluded it is not best to swap horses while crossing the
river, and have further concluded that I am not so poor a horse
that they might not make a botch of it in trying to swap."
But the Union Party was so far from being a unit that during the
summer factional quarrels developed within its ranks. All the
elements that were unfriendly to Lincoln took heart from a
dispute betweenthe President and Congress with regard to
reconstruction in Louisiana, over a large part of which Federal
troops had established a civil government on the President's
authority. As an incident in the history of reconstruction, this
whole matter has its place in another volume.1 But it also has a
place in the history of the presidential campaign of 1864.
Lincoln's plan of reconstruction was obnoxious to the Radicals in
Congress inasmuch as it did not definitely abolish slavery in
Louisiana, although it required the new Government to give its
adherence to the Emancipation Proclamation. Congress passed a
bill taking reconstruction out of the President's hands and
definitely requiring the reconstructed States to abolish slavery.
Lincoln took the position that Congress had no power over slavery
in the States. When his Proclamation was thrown in his teeth, he
replied, "I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on
military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by
Congress." Incidentally there was a further disagreement between
the President and the Radicals over negro suffrage. Though
neither scheme provided for it, Lincoln would extend it, if at
all, only to the exceptional negroes, while the Radicals were
ready for a sweeping extension. But Lincoln refused to sign
their bill and it lapsed. Thereupon Benjamin Wade of Ohio and
Henry Winter Davis of Maryland issued a savage denunciation of
Lincoln which has been known ever since as the "Wade-Davis
Manifesto".
There was a faction in the Union Party which we may justly name
the Vindictives. The "Manifesto" gave them a rallying cry. At a
conference in New York they decided to compel the retirement of
Lincoln and the nomination of some other candidate. For this
purpose a new convention was to be called at Cincinnati in
September. In the ranks of the Vindictives at this time was the
impetuous editor of the "New York Tribune", Horace Greeley. His
presence there calls for some explanation. Perhaps the most
singular figure of the time, he was one of the most irresponsible
and yet, through his paper, one of the most influential. He had
a trick of phrase which, somehow, made him appear oracular to the
plain people, especially in the rural districts—the very people
on whom Lincoln relied for a large part of his support. Greeley
knew his power, and his mind was not large enough to carry the
knowledge well. Furthermore, his was the sort of nature that
relates itself to life above all through the sensibilities.
Kipling speaks scornfully of people who if their "own front door
is shut will swear the world is warm." They are relations in the
full blood of Horace Greeley.
In July, when the breach between the President and the
Vindictives was just beginning to be evident, Greeley was
pursuing an adventure of his own. Among the least sensible minor
incidents of the war were a number of fantastic attempts of
private persons to negotiate peace. With one exception they had
no historic importance. The exception is a negotiation carried
on by Greeley, which seems to have been the ultimate cause of his
alliance with the Vindictives.
In the middle of July, 1864, gold was selling in New York at 285.
There was distress and discontent throughout the country. The
horrible slaughter of the Wilderness, still fresh in everybody's
mind, had put the whole Union Party into mourning. The
impressionable Greeley became frantic for peace peace at any
price. At the psychological moment word was conveyed to him that
two persons in Canada held authority from the Confederacy to
enter into negotiations for peace. Greeley wrote to Lincoln
demanding negotiations because "our bleeding, bankrupt, almost
dying country longs for peace, shudders at the prospect of fresh
conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new
rivers of human blood."
Lincoln consented to a negotiation but stipulated that Greeley
himself should become responsible for its conduct. Though this
was not what Greeley wanted for his type always prefers to tell
others what to do—he sullenly accepted. He proceeded to Niagara
to meet the reputed commissioners of the Confederacy. The
details of the futile conference do not concern us. The
Confederate agents were not empowered to treat for peace—at
least not on any terms that would be considered at Washington.
Their real purpose was far subtler. Appreciating the delicate
balance in Northern politics, they aimed at making it appear that
Lincoln was begging for terms. Lincoln, who foresaw this
possible turn of events, had expressly limited Greeley to
negotiations for "the integrity of the whole Union and the
abandonment of slavery." Greeley chose to believe that these
instructions, and not the subtlety of the Confederate agents and
his own impulsiveness, were the cause of the false position in
which the agents now placed him. They published an account of
the episode, thus effecting an exposure which led to sharp
attacks upon Greeley by the Northern press. In the bitterness of
his mortification Greeley then went from one extreme to the other
and joined the Vindictives.
Less than three weeks after the conference at Niagara, the
"Wade-Davis Manifesto" appeared. It was communicated to the
country through the columns of Greeley's paper on the 5th of
August. Greeley, who so short a time before was for peace at any
price, went the whole length of reaction by proclaiming that "Mr.
Lincoln is already beaten.... We must have another ticket to
save us from utter overthrow. If we had such a ticket as could
be made by naming Grant, Butler, or Sherman for President and
Farragut for Vice, we could make a fight yet."
At about this same time the chairman of the Republican national
committee, who was a Lincoln man, wrote to the President that the
situation was desperate. Lincoln himself is known to have made a
private memorandum containing the words, "It seems extremely
probable that this Administration will not be reelected." On the
1st of September, 1864, with three presidential candidates in the
field, Northern politics were bewildering, and the country was
shrouded in the deepest gloom. The Wilderness campaign, after
slaughter unparalleled, had not in the popular mind achieved
results. Sherman, in Georgia, though his losses were not as
terrible as Grant's, had not yet done anything to lighten the
gloom. Not even Farragut's victory in Mobile Bay, in August,
far-reaching as it proved to be, reassured the North. A bitter
cry for peace went up even from lovers of the Union whose hearts
had failed.
Meanwhile, the brilliant strategist in Georgia was pressing his
drive for political as well as for military effect. To rouse
those Unionists who had lost heart was part of his purpose when
he hurled his columns against Atlanta, from which Hood was driven
in one of the most disastrous of Confederate defeats. On the 3rd
of September Lincoln issued a proclamation appointing a day of
thanksgiving for these great victories of Sherman and Farragut.
On that day, it would seem, the tide turned in Northern politics.
Some historians are content with Atlanta as the explanation of
all that followed; but there are three separate events of
importance that now occurred as incidents in the complicated
situation. In the first place, three weeks later the radical
opposition had collapsed; the plan for a new convention was
abandoned; the Vindictive leaders came out in support of Lincoln.
Almost simultaneously occurred the remaining two surprising
events. Fremont withdrew from his candidacy in order to do his
"part toward preventing the election of the Democratic
candidate." And Lincoln asked for the resignation of a member of
his Cabinet, Postmaster-General Montgomery Blair, who was the
especial enemy of the Vindictives.
The official biographers of Lincoln2 keep these three events
separate. They hold that Blair's removal was wholly Lincoln's
idea, and that from chivalrous reasons he would not abandon his
friend as long as he seemed to be losing the game. The historian
Rhodes writes confidently of a bargain with Fremont, holding that
Blair was removed to terminate a quarrel with Fremont which dated
back even to his own removal in 1861. A possible third theory
turns upon Chase, whose hostility to Blair was quite equal to
that of the illbalanced Fremont. It had been stimulated the
previous winter by a fierce arraignment of Chase made by Blair's
brother in Congress, in which Chase was bluntly accused of fraud
and of making money, or allowing his friends to make money,
through illicit trade in cotton. And Chase was a man of might
among the Vindictives. The intrigue, however, never comes to the
foreground in history, but lurks in the background thick with
shadows. Once or twice among those shadows we seem to catch a
glimpse of the figure of Thurlow Weed, the master-politician of
the time. Taking one thing with another, we may risk the guess
that somehow the two radical groups which were both relentless
against Blair were led to pool their issues, and that Blair's
removal was the price Lincoln paid not to one faction of radicals
but to the whole unmerciful crowd.
Whatever complex of purposes lay back of the triple coincidence,
the latter part of September saw a general reunion of the
factions within the Union Party, followed by a swift recovery of
strength. When the election came, Lincoln received an electoral
vote of 212 against 21, and a popular vote of 2,330,552 against
1,835,985.
The inevitable question arises as to what was the real cause of
this success. It is safe to say that the political campaign
contained some adroit strategy; that Sherman was without doubt an
enormous factor; that the Democrats made numerous blunders; and
that the secret societies had an effect other than they intended.
However, the real clue seems to be found in one sentence from a
letter written by Lowell to Motley when the outlook for his party
was darkest: "The mercantile classes are longing for peace, but I
believe that the people are more firm than ever." Of the great,
silent mass of the people, the true temper seems to be struck off
in a popular poem of the time, written in response to one of the
calls for more troops, a poem with refrains built on the model of
this couplet:
"We're coming from the hillside, we're coming from the shore,
We're coming, Father Abraham, six hundred thousand more."
1Walter L. Fleming, The Sequel of Appomattox. In The
Chronicles of America.
2His private secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay.
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