A Political History of the State of New York Volume III Part 3

Nevertheless, the difference between the great ma.s.s of Democrats and the supporters of the People's party was more apparent than real.[806]

Each professed undying devotion to the Union. Each, also, favoured a vigorous prosecution of the war. As the campaign advanced the activity of the army strengthened this loyalty and minimised the criticism of harsh methods. Moreover, the impression obtained that the war would soon be over.[807] McClellan was in command, and the people had not yet learned that "our chicken was no eagle, after all," as Lowell expressed it.[808] Controversy over the interference with slavery also became less acute. John Cochrane, now commanding a regiment at the front, declared, in a speech to his soldiers, that slaves of the enemy, being elements of strength, ought to be captured as much as muskets or cannon, and that whenever he could seize a slave, and even arm him to fight for the government, he would do so.

[Footnote 806: "There are sympathisers with the secessionists still remaining in the Democratic ranks, but they compose a small portion of the party. Nine-tenths of it is probably strenuous in the determination that the const.i.tutional authority of the government shall be maintained and enforced without compromise. This sentiment is far more prevalent and decided than it was two months ago."--New York _Tribune_, November 19, 1861.]

[Footnote 807: "I have now no doubt this causeless and most flagitious rebellion is to be put down much sooner than many, myself included, thought practicable."--Edwin Croswell, letter in New York _Tribune_, November 25, 1861.]

[Footnote 808: Political Essays, p. 94.--_North American Review_, April, 1864.]

In conducting the campaign the People's leaders discountenanced any criticism of the Government's efforts to restore the Union. "It is not Lincoln and the Republicans we are sustaining," wrote Daniel S.

d.i.c.kinson. "They have nothing to do with it. It is the government of our fathers, worth just as much as if it was administered by Andrew Jackson. There is but one side to it."[809] As a rule the Hards accepted this view, and at the ratification of the ticket in New York, on September 20, Lyman Tremaine swelled the long list of speakers. A letter was also read from Greene C. Bronson. To those who heard James T. Brady at Cooper Inst.i.tute on the evening of October 28 he seemed inspired. His piercing eyes burned in their sockets, and his animated face, now pale with emotion, expressed more than his emphatic words the loathing felt for men who had plunged their country into b.l.o.o.d.y strife.

[Footnote 809: Daniel S. d.i.c.kinson's _Life, Letters, and Speeches_, Vol. 2, pp. 550-551.]

Nevertheless, it remained for Daniel S. d.i.c.kinson to stigmatise the Democratic party. At the Union Square meeting he had burned his bridges. It was said he had nowhere else to go; that the Hards went out of business when the South went out of the Union; and that to the Softs he was _non persona grata_. There was much truth in this statement. But having once become a Radical his past affiliations gave him some advantages. For more than twenty years he had been known throughout the State as a Southern sympathiser. In the United States Senate he stood with the South for slavery, and in the election of 1860 he voted for Breckinridge. He was the most conspicuous doughface in New York. Now, he was an advocate of vigorous war and a p.r.o.nounced supporter of President Lincoln. This gave him the importance of a new convert at a camp meeting. The people believed he knew what he was talking about, and while his stories and apt ill.u.s.trations, enriched by a quick change in voice and manner, convulsed his audiences, imbedded in his wit and rollicking fun were most convincing arguments which appealed to the best sentiments of his hearers.[810] Indeed, it is not too much to say that Daniel S. d.i.c.kinson, as an entertaining and forceful platform speaker, filled the place in 1861 which John Van Buren occupied in the Free-soil campaign in 1848.

[Footnote 810: "I have just finished a second reading of your speech in Wyoming County, and with so much pleasure and admiration that I cannot refrain from thanking you. It is a speech worthy of an American statesman, and will command the attention of the country by its high and generous patriotism, no less than by its eloquence and power."--Letter of John K. Porter of Albany to D.S. d.i.c.kinson, August 23, 1861. _d.i.c.kinson's Life, Letters, and Speeches_, Vol. 2, p. 553.

Similar letters were written by Henry W. Rogers of Buffalo, William H.

Seward, Dr. N. Niles, and others.--_Ibid._, pp. 555, 559, 561.]

A single address by Horatio Seymour, delivered at Utica on October 28, proved his right to speak for the Democratic party. He had a difficult task to perform. Men had changed front in a day, and to one of his views, holding rebellion as a thing to be crushed without impairing existing conditions, it seemed imperative to divorce "revolutionary emanc.i.p.ators" from the conservative patriots who loved their country as it was. He manifested a desire to appear scrupulously loyal to the Government, counseling obedience to const.i.tuted authorities, respect for const.i.tutional obligations, and a just and liberal support of the President, in whose favour every presumption should be given. The suspension of the writ of _habeas corpus_ and the long list of arbitrary arrests had provoked Seymour as it did many conservative Republicans, but however much individual rights may be violated, he said, so long as the country is engaged in a struggle for its existence, confidence, based upon the a.s.sumption that imperative reasons exist for these unusual measures, must be reposed in the Administration. This was the incarnation of loyalty.

But Seymour closed his address with an ugly crack of the whip.

Dropping his well-selected words with the skill of a practised debater, he blended the history of past wrongs with those of the present, thus harrowing his auditors into a frame of mind as resentful and pa.s.sionate as his own. When the public safety permits, he said threateningly, there will be abundant time to condemn and punish the authors of injustice and wrong, whether they occupy the presidential chair or seats in the cabinet. "Let them remember the teachings of history. Despotic governments do not love the agitators that call them into existence. When Cromwell drove from Parliament the latter-day saints and higher-law men of his day, and 'bade them cease their babblings;' and when Napoleon scattered at the point of the bayonet the Council of Five Hundred and crushed revolution beneath his iron heel, they taught a lesson which should be heeded this day by men who are animated by a vindictive piety or a malignant philanthropy....

It is the boast of the Briton that his house is his castle. However humble it may be, the King cannot enter. Let it not be said that the liberties of American citizens are less perfectly protected, or held less sacred than are those of the subjects of a Crown."

The slavery question was less easily and logically handled. He denied that it caused the war, but admitted that the agitators did, putting into the same cla.s.s "the ambitious man at the South, who desired a separate confederacy," and "the ambitious men of the North, who reaped a political profit from agitation." In deprecating emanc.i.p.ation he carefully avoided the argument of military necessity, so forcibly put by John Cochrane, and strangely overlooked the fact that the South, by the act of rebellion, put itself outside the protection guaranteed under the Const.i.tution to loyal and law-abiding citizens. "If it be true," he said, "that slavery must be abolished to save this Union, then the people of the South should be allowed to withdraw themselves from the Government which cannot give them the protection guaranteed by its terms." Immediate emanc.i.p.ation, he continued, would not end the contest. "It would be only the commencement of a lasting, destructive, terrible domestic conflict. The North would not consent that four millions of free negroes should live in their midst.... With what justice do we demand that the South should be subjected to the evils, the insecurity, and the loss of const.i.tutional rights, involved in immediate abolition?" Then, dropping into prophecy, the broad, optimistic statesmanship of the forties pa.s.sed into eclipse as he declared that "we are either to be restored to our former position, with the Const.i.tution unweakened, the powers of the State unimpaired, and the fireside rights of our citizens duly protected, or our whole system of government is to fall!"

Seymour, in closing, very clearly outlined his future platform. "We are willing to support this war as a means of restoring our Union, but we will not carry it on in a spirit of hatred, malice, or revenge. We cannot, therefore, make it a war for the abolition of slavery. We will not permit it to be made a war upon the rights of the States. We shall see that it does not crush out the liberties of the citizen, or the reserved powers of the States. We shall hold that man to be as much a traitor who urges our government to overstep its const.i.tutional powers, as he who resists the exercise of its rightful authority. We shall contend that the rights of the States and the General Government are equally sacred."[811]

[Footnote 811: _Public Record of Horatio Seymour_, pp. 32-43.]

If the campaign contributed to the South a certain degree of comfort, reviving the hope that it would yet have a divided North to contend against, the election, giving d.i.c.kinson over 100,000 majority, furnished little encouragement. The People's party also carried both branches of the Legislature, securing twenty out of thirty-two senators, and seventy out of the one hundred and twenty-eight a.s.semblymen. Among the latter, Henry J. Raymond and Thomas G. Alvord, former speakers, represented the undaunted mettle needed at Albany.

To add to the result so gratifying to the fusionists, George Opd.y.k.e defeated Fernando Wood by a small plurality for mayor of New York.

Wood had long been known as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He talked reform and grew degenerate; he proclaimed patriotic views and held disloyal sentiments; he listened respectfully to public opinion, and defied it openly in his acts. He did not become a boss. It was ten years later before William M. Tweed centralised Tammany's power in one man. But Wood developed the system that made a boss possible. He dominated the police, he organised the lawless, he allied himself with the saloon, and he used the judiciary. In 1858, being forced out of Tammany, he retreated like a wounded tiger to Mozart Hall, organised an opposition society that took its name from the a.s.sembly room in which it met, and declared with emphasis and expletives that he would fight Tammany as long as he lived. From that moment his shadow had kept sachems alarmed, and his presence had thrown conventions into turmoil.

The arts of the card-sharper and thimble-rigger had been prodigally employed to save the candidate of Mozart Hall. Even the sachems of Tammany, to avert disaster, nominated James T. Brady, whose great popularity it was believed would draw strength from both Opd.y.k.e and Wood; but Brady refused to be used. Opd.y.k.e had been a liberal, progressive Democrat of the Free-Soil type and a pioneer Republican.

He a.s.sociated with Chase in the Buffalo convention of 1848 and cooperated with Greeley in defeating Seward in 1860. He had also enjoyed the career of a busy and successful merchant, and, although fifty years old, was destined to take a prominent part in munic.i.p.al politics for the next two decades. One term in the a.s.sembly summed up his office-holding experience; yet in that brief and uneventful period jobbers learned to shun him and rogues to fear him. This was one reason why the brilliant and audacious leader of Mozart Hall, in his death struggle with an honest man, suddenly a.s.sumed to be the champion of public purity.

CHAPTER III

"THE MAD DESPERATION OF REACTION"

1862

Notwithstanding its confidence in General McClellan, whose success in West Virginia had made him the successor of General Scott, giving him command of all the United States forces, the North, by midsummer, became profoundly discouraged. Many events contributed to it. The defeat at Ball's Bluff on the Potomac, which Roscoe Conkling likened to the battle of Cannae, because "the very pride and flower of our young men were among its victims,"[812] had been followed by conspicuous incompetence at Mana.s.sas and humiliating failure on the Peninsula. Moreover, financial difficulties increased the despondency.

At the outbreak of hostilities practical repudiation of Southern debts had brought widespread disaster. "The fabric of New York's mercantile prosperity," said the _Tribune_, "lies in ruins, beneath which ten thousand fortunes are buried. Last fall the merchant was a capitalist; to-day he is a bankrupt."[813] In September, 1861, these losses aggregated $200,000,000.[814] Besides, the strain of raising sufficient funds to meet government expenses had forced a suspension of specie payment and driven people to refuse United States notes payable on demand without interest. Meantime, the nation's expenses aggregated $2,000,000 a day and the Treasury was empty. "I have been obliged,"

wrote the Secretary of the Treasury, "to draw for the last installment of the November loan."[815]

[Footnote 812: _Congressional Globe_, January 6, 1862.]

[Footnote 813: New York _Tribune_, May 27, 1861.]

[Footnote 814: _Ibid._, September 18.]

[Footnote 815: Letter of Secretary Chase, dated February 3, 1862.--E.G.

Spaulding, _History of the Legal Tender_, p. 59.]

To meet this serious financial condition, Elbridge G. Spaulding of Buffalo, then a member of Congress, had been designated to prepare an emergency measure to avoid national bankruptcy. "We must have at least $100,000,000 during the next three months," he wrote, on January 8, 1862, "or the government must stop payment."[816] Spaulding, then fifty-two years of age, was president of a bank, a trained financier, and already the possessor of a large fortune. Having served in the Thirty-first Congress, he had returned in 1859, after an absence of eight years, to remain four years longer. Strong, alert, and sufficiently positive to be stubborn, he possessed the confidence of Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, who approved his plan of issuing $100,000,000 legal-tender, non-interest bearing treasury notes, exchangeable at par for six-twenty bonds.

Spaulding fully appreciated the objections to his policy, but the only other course, he argued, was to sell bonds as in the war of 1812, which, if placed at six percent interest, would not, in his opinion, bring more than sixty cents--a ruinous method of conducting hostilities. However, his plea of necessity found a divided committee and in Roscoe Conkling a most formidable opponent, who attacked the measure as unnecessary, extravagant, unsound, without precedent, of doubtful const.i.tutionality, and morally imperfect.[817]

[Footnote 816: Spaulding, _History of the Legal Tender_, p. 18.]

[Footnote 817: The bill escaped from the committee by one majority.]

It was in this debate that Conkling, adroitly choosing the right time and the proper subject, impressed the country with his power as an orator and his ability as a brilliant, resourceful debater, although, perhaps, a destructive rather than constructive legislator. Nature had lavished upon him superb gifts of mind and person. He was of commanding, even magnificent presence, six feet three inches tall, with regular features, lofty forehead, and piercing eyes,--blond and gigantic as a viking. It was difficult, indeed, for a man so superlatively handsome not to be vain, and the endeavour upon his part to conceal the defect was not in evidence. Although an unpopular and unruly schoolboy, who refused to go to college, he had received a good education, learning much from a scholarly father, a college-bred man, and an ornament to the United States District Court for more than a quarter of a century. Moreover, from early youth Conkling had studied elocution, training a strong, slightly musical voice, and learning the use of secondary accents, the choice of words, the value of deliberate speech, and the a.s.sumption of an impressive earnestness. In this debate, too, he discovered the talent for ridicule and sarcasm that distinguished him in later life, when he had grown less considerate of the feelings of opponents, and indicated something of the imperiousness and vanity which clouded an otherwise attractive manner.

As he stubbornly and eloquently contested the progress of the legal-tender measure with forceful argument and a wealth of information, Conkling seemed likely to deprive Spaulding of the t.i.tle of "father of the greenback" until the Secretary of the Treasury, driven to desperation for want of money, reluctantly came to the Congressman's rescue and forced the bill through Congress.[818] By midsummer, however, gold had jumped to seventeen per cent., while the cost of the war, augmented by a call for 300,000 three years' men and by a draft of 300,000 nine months' militia, rested more heavily than ever upon the country. Moreover, by September 1 McClellan had been deprived of his command, the Army of the Potomac had suffered defeat at the second battle of Bull Run, and Lee and Longstreet, with a victorious army, were on their way to Maryland. The North stood aghast!

[Footnote 818: On Spaulding's motion to close debate, Conkling demanded tellers, and the motion was lost,--yeas, 52; nays, 62.--_Congressional Globe_, February 5, 1862; _Ibid._, p. 618.]

Much more ominous than military disaster and financial embarra.s.sment, however, was the divisive sentiment over emanc.i.p.ation. Northern armies, moving about in slave communities, necessarily acted as a constant disintegrating force. Slaves gave soldiers aid and information, and soldiers, stimulated by their natural hostility to slave-owners, gave slaves protection and sympathy. Thus, very early in the war, many men believed that rebellion and slavery were so intertwined that both must be simultaneously overthrown. This sentiment found expression in the Fremont proclamation, issued on August 30, 1861, setting free all slaves owned by persons who aided secession in the military department of Missouri. On the other hand, the Government, seeking to avoid the slavery question, encouraged military commanders to refuse refuge to the negroes within their lines, and in modifying Fremont's order to conform to the Confiscation Act of August 6, the President aroused a discussion characterised by increasing acerbity, which divided the Republican party into Radicals and Conservatives. The former, led by the _Tribune_, resented the att.i.tude of army officers, who, it charged, being notoriously in more or less thorough sympathy with the inciting cause of rebellion, failed to seize opportunities to strike at slavery. Among Radicals the belief obtained that one half of the commanding generals desired to prosecute the war so delicately that slavery should receive the least possible harm, and in their comments in Congress and in the press they made no concealment of their opinion, that such officers were much more anxious to restore fugitive slaves to rebel owners than to make their owners prisoners of war.[819] They were correspondingly flattering to those generals who proclaimed abolition as an adjunct of the war.

Greeley's taunts had barbed points. "He is no extemporised soldier, looking for a presidential nomination or seat in Congress," he said of General Hunter, whose order had freed the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. "He is neither a political or civil engineer, but simply a patriot whose profession is war, and who does not understand making war so as not to hurt your enemy."[820]

[Footnote 819: New York _Tribune_, July 30, 1862.]

[Footnote 820: _Ibid._, August 4.]

When the _Times_, an exponent of the Conservatives, defended the Administration's policy with the declaration that slaves were used as fast as obtained,[821] the _Tribune_ minimized the intelligence of its editor. "Consider," it said, "the still unmodified order of McDowell, issued a full year ago, forbidding the harbouring of negroes within our lines. Consider Halleck's order, now nine months old and still operative, forbidding negroes to come within our lines at all.

McClellan has issued a goodly number of orders and proclamations, but not one of them offers protection and freedom to such slaves of rebels as might see fit to claim them at his hands. His only order bearing upon their condition and prospects is that which expelled the Hutchinsons from his camp for the crime of singing anti-slavery songs."[822]

[Footnote 821: New York _Times_, July 17, 1862.]

[Footnote 822: New York _Tribune_, July 19, 1862.]

The dominant sentiment in Congress reflected the feeling of the Radicals, and under the pressure of McClellan's reverses before Richmond, the House, on July 11, and the Senate on the following day, pa.s.sed the Confiscation Act, freeing forever the slaves of rebel owners whenever within control of the Government. The Administration's failure to enforce this act in the spirit and to the extent that Congress intended, finally brought out the now historic "Prayer of Twenty Millions"--an editorial signed by Horace Greeley and addressed to Abraham Lincoln. It charged the President with being disastrously remiss in the discharge of his official duty and unduly influenced by the menaces of border slave State politicians. It declared that the Union was suffering from timid counsels and mistaken deference to rebel slavery; that all attempts to put down rebellion and save slavery are preposterous and futile; and that every hour of obeisance to slavery is an added hour of deepened peril to the Union. In conclusion, he entreated the Chief Executive to render hearty and unequivocal obedience to the law of the land.[823]

[Footnote 823: _Ibid._, August 20.

Lincoln's reply appeared in the _National Intelligencer_ of Washington. He said in part: "I would save the Union. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more when I shall believe doing more will help the cause."--_Lincoln's Works_, Vol. 2, p. 227.]

Thus did Greeley devote his great powers to force Lincoln into emanc.i.p.ation. It is impossible, even at this distance of time, to turn the pages of his ponderous volumes without feeling the matchless force of his energy, the strength of his masterly array of facts, his biting sarcasm, his bold a.s.sumptions, and his clear, unadorned style. There is about it all an impa.s.sioned conviction, as if he spoke because he could not keep silent, making it impossible to avoid the belief that the whole soul and conscience of the writer were in his work. Day after day, with kaleidoscopic change, he marshalled arguments, facts, and historical parallels, bearing down the reader's judgment as he swept away like a great torrent the criticisms of himself and the arguments of his opponents. Nothing apparently could withstand his onslaught on slavery. With one dash of his pen he forged sentences that, lance-like, found their way into every joint of the monster's armour.

Greeley's criticism of the President and the army, however, gave his enemies vantage ground for renewed attacks. Ever since he suggested, at the beginning of hostilities, that the _Herald_ did not care which flag floated over its office, James Gordon Bennett, possessing the genuine newspaper genius, had daily evinced a deep, personal dislike of the _Tribune's_ editor, and throughout the discussion of emanc.i.p.ation, the _Herald_, in bitter editorials, kept its columns in a glow, tantalising the _Tribune_ with a persistency that recalls Cheetham's attacks upon Aaron Burr. The strategical advantage lay with the _Herald_, since the initiative belonged to the _Tribune_, but the latter had with it the preponderating sentiment of its party and the growing influence of a war necessity. Greeley fought with a broad-sword, swinging it with a vigorous and well-aimed effect, while Bennett, with lighter weapon, p.r.i.c.ked, stabbed, and cut. Never inactive, the latter sought to aggravate and embitter. Greeley, on the contrary, intent upon forcing the Administration to change its policy, ignored his tormentor, until exasperation, like the gathering steam in a geyser, drove him into further action. In this prolonged controversy the _Tribune_ invariably referred to its adversary as "the _Herald_,"

but in the _Herald_, "Greeley," "old Greeley," "poor Greeley," "Mars Greeley," "poor crazy Greeley," became synonyms for the editor of the _Tribune_.