News that Meade had stopped Lee at Gettysburg sent Lincoln"s expectations soaring; he foresaw the end of the war, here and now, if only the victory could be pressed to its logical conclusion with "the literal or substantial destruction" of the rebel host before it recrossed the Potomac. Then came the letdown, first in the form of the northern commander"s Fourth of July congratulatory order to his troops, calling for still "greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader." Lincoln"s spirits took a sudden drop. "My G.o.d, is that all?" he exclaimed, and presently he added: "This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan.... Will our generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil." His fears were enlarged the following day by word that Lee had stolen away in the night, and no dispatch from Meade, that day or the next, gave any a.s.surance of a vigorous pursuit. Lincoln fretted as much after as he had done before or during the three-day battle, so high were his hopes and so great was his apprehension that they would be unfulfilled. At a cabinet meeting on July 7 his expression was one of "sadness and despondency," according to Welles, "that Meade still lingered at Gettysburg, when he should have been at Hagerstown or near the Potomac, in an effort to cut off the retreating army of Lee." That afternoon he was conferring with Chase and a few others in his office, pointing out Grant"s progress to date on a map of Mississippi, when Welles came running into the room with a broad smile on his face and a telegram from Porter in his hand. The admiral had sent a fast boat up to Cairo, the Memphis wirehead having broken down, and beat the army in getting the news to Washington: "I have the honor to inform you that Vicksburg has surrendered to the U.S. forces on this 4th day of July."
Lincoln rose at once. "I myself will telegraph this news to General Meade," he said, then took his hat as if to go, but paused and turned to Welles, throwing one arm across the shoulders of the bearer of good tidings. "What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence? He is always giving us good news. I cannot in words tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr Welles; it is great!" The Secretary beamed as he walked to the telegraph office with his chief, who could not contain his pleasure at the outcome of Grant"s campaign. "This will relieve Banks. It will inspire me," he said as he strode along. He thought it might also inspire Meade, and he had Halleck pa.s.s the word to him that Vicksburg had surrendered; "Now if General Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far ... the rebellion will be over."
A wire also went to Grant: "It gives me great pleasure to inform you that you have been appointed a major general in the Regular Army, to rank from July 4, the date of your capture of Vicksburg." Moreover, on Grant"s recommendation, Sherman and McPherson soon were made permanent brigadiers, the reward that had gone to Meade at Frederick that same day. The following day, however, when Grant"s own announcement of Pemberton"s capitulation came limping in behind Porter"s-which had said nothing about terms-there was cause to think that his victory was by no means as complete as had been supposed before details of the surrender were disclosed. Surprise and doubt were the reaction to the news that practically all of the nearly 30,000-man garrison had been paroled. Halleck, for instance, protested by return wire that such terms might "be construed into an absolute release, and that the men will immediately be placed in the ranks of the enemy." Grant had already noted that the arrangement left his and Porter"s "troops and transports ready for immediate service" against Johnston and Gardner, which otherwise would not have been the case, and when he explained that the parolees had been turned over to an authorized Confederate commissioner for the exchange of prisoners, which made the contract strictly legal, Old Brains was mollified. So was Lincoln, who was a lawyer himself and knew the dangers that lurked in informalities, though what appealed to him most was Grant"s further contention that the surrendered troops were "tired of the war and would get home just as soon as they could." There, he believed, they would be likely to create more problems for the Confederacy than if they had been lodged in northern prison camps, a headache for the Union, which would be obliged to feed and guard them while awaiting their exchange.
Others not only disagreed, but some among them formed a delegation to call on Lincoln with a protest against Grant"s dereliction and a demand for his dismissal from command. What rebel could be trusted? they asked, and predicted that within the month Pemberton"s men would violate their parole and be back in the field, once again doing their worst to tear the fabric of the Union. Referring to his callers as "crossroads wiseacres," though they must have included some influential dignitaries, Lincoln afterwards described to a friend his handling of the situation. "I thought the best way to get rid of them was to tell the story of Sykes"s dog. Have you ever heard about Sykes"s yellow dog? Well, I must tell you about him. Sykes had a yellow dog he set great store by-" And he went on to explain that this affection was not shared by a group of boys who disliked the beast intensely and spent much of their time "meditating how they could get the best of him." At last they hit upon the notion of wrapping an explosive cartridge in a piece of meat, attaching a long fuze to it, and whistling for the dog. When he came out and bolted the meat, cartridge and all, they touched off the fuze, with spectacular results. Sykes came running out of the house to investigate the explosion. "What"s up? Anything busted?" he cried. And then he saw the dog, or what was left of him. He picked up the biggest piece he could find, "a portion of the back with part of the tail still hanging to it," and said mournfully: "Well, I guess he"ll never be much account again-as a dog." Lincoln paused, then made his point. "I guess Pemberton"s forces will never be much account again as an army." He smiled, recalling the reaction of his callers. "The delegation began looking around for their hats before I had got quite to the end of the story," he told his friend, "and I was never bothered any more after that about superseding the commander of the Army of the Tennessee."
Now as always he shielded Grant from the critics who were so quick to come crying of butchery, whiskey, or incompetence. "I can"t spare this man. He fights," he had said after Shiloh, and more than a month before the surrender of Vicksburg he had called the campaign leading up to the siege "one of the most brilliant in the world." In a sense, this latest and greatest achievement was a vindication not only of Grant but also of the Commander in Chief who had sustained him. Perhaps Lincoln saw it so. At any rate, though previously he had corresponded with him only through Halleck, even in the conferring of praise and promotions, this curious hands-off formality, which had no counterpart in his relations with any of the rest of his army commanders, past or present, ended on July 13, when he wrote him the following letter: My dear General.
I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do what you finally did-march the troops across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pa.s.s expedition and the like could succeed. When you got below and took Port Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join General Banks; and when you turned northward, east of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right and I was wrong.
Yours very truly.
A. LINCOLN.
Though in time, when news of the fall of Port Hudson arrived, a congratulatory dispatch also went to Banks, expressing Lincoln"s "thanks for your very successful and very valuable military operations this year"-"The final stroke in opening the Mississippi never should, and I think never will, be forgotten," he wrote-no such letter went to Meade, nor did Lincoln mention him by name in responding to a White House serenade on the evening of July 7, tendered in celebration of the double victory. "These are trying occasions," he said, adding a somber note to the tone of jubilation, "not only in success, but also for want of success." He withheld personal praise of Meade because he was waiting for a larger occasion that did not come, though he kept hoping against hope. Finally, his hopes dwindling, he turned cynical. On July 12, when the general wired that he would attack the flood-stalled Confederates next day "unless something intervenes to prevent it," Lincoln ventured a prediction: "They will be ready to fight a magnificent battle when there is no enemy there to fight." Nevertheless, the news two days later that Lee had made a getaway came as an awful shock to him. "We had them in our grasp," he groaned. "We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours. And nothing I could say or do could make the army move." He told his son Robert, home from Harvard: "If I had gone up there, I could have whipped them myself." So great was his distress, he adjourned a cabinet meeting on grounds that he was in no frame of mind for fit deliberation. Nor was he. In his extremity-having pa.s.sed in rapid succession from cynicism, through puzzlement and exasperation, to the edge of paranoia-he questioned not only the nerve and competence of Meade and his subordinates, but also their motives. "And that, my G.o.d, is the last of this Army of the Potomac!" he cried as he walked out with the Secretary of the Navy. "There is bad faith somewhere. Meade has been pressed and urged, but only one of his generals was for an immediate attack, was ready to pounce on Lee; the rest held back. What does it mean, Mr. Welles? Great G.o.d, what does it mean?"
Halleck did not exaggerate in wiring Meade of Lincoln"s "great dissatisfaction" on that day; Welles recorded in his diary that "on only one or two occasions have I ever seen the President so troubled, so dejected and discouraged." Meade"s request to be relieved of command, submitted promptly in response to Halleck"s wire, shocked Lincoln into recovering his balance. For this was more than a military matter; it was a downright political threat, with sobering implications. The Administration simply could not afford to be placed in the position of having forced the resignation of the man who, in three hard days of fighting, had just turned back the supreme Confederate effort to conquer a peace: an effort, moreover, launched hard on the heels of Union defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, which had been fought under leaders now recognized as hand-picked incompetents, both of whom had been kept in command for more than a month after their fiascos. No matter what opinion the citizenry might have as to whether or not the rebels had been "invaders," politically it would not do to make a martyr of the hero who had driven them from what he called "our soil." After instructing Old Brains to decline the general"s request to be relieved, Lincoln sat down and wrote Meade a letter designed to a.s.suage the burning in his breast. So great was his own distress, however, that the words came out somewhat differently from what he had intended. In the end it was Lincoln"s burning that was a.s.suaged, at least in part. For example, yesterday"s letter to Grant had begun: "My dear General," whereas today"s bore no salutation at all, merely the heading: "Major General Meade." He opened by saying, "I am very-very-grateful to you for the magnificent success you gave the cause of the country at Gettysburg, and I am sorry now to [have been] the author of the slightest pain to you. But I was in such deep distress myself that I could not restrain some expression of it." Whereupon he proceeded to extend that expression of dissatisfaction in a review of the events of the past ten days. Meade had "fought and beat the enemy," with losses equally severe on both sides; then Lee"s retreat had been halted by the swollen Potomac, and though Meade had been substantially reinforced and Lee had not, "yet you stood and let the flood run down, bridges be built, and the enemy move away at his leisure, without attacking him." The words were cutting, but those that followed were sharper still. "Again, my dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee"s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely.... It would be unreasonable to expect, and I do not expect you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it."
He ended with a further attempt at rea.s.surance: "I beg you will not consider this a prosecution or persecution of yourself. As you had learned that I was dissatisfied, I have thought it best to kindly tell you why." But on reading the letter over he could see that it was perhaps not so "kindly" after all; that, in fact, rather than serve the purpose of soothing the general"s injured feelings, it was more likely to provoke him into resubmitting his request to be relieved of his command. So Lincoln put the sheets in an envelope labeled "To General Meade, never sent or signed," filed it away in his desk, and having thus relieved his spleen contented himself with issuing next day a "Proclamation of Thanksgiving," expressing his grat.i.tude, not to Grant or Meade or Banks or Prentiss, but to Almighty G.o.d for "victories on land and on the sea so signal and so effective as to furnish reasonable grounds for augmented confidence that the Union of these States will be maintained, their Const.i.tution preserved, and their peace and prosperity permanently restored." He further besought the public to "render the homage due to the Divine Majesty, for the wonderful things He has done in the nation"s behalf, and invoke the influence of His Holy Spirit to subdue the anger which has produced and so long sustained a needless and cruel rebellion, to change the hearts of the insurgents, to guide the counsels of the Government with wisdom adequate to so great a national emergency, and to visit with tender care and consolation throughout the length and breadth of our land all those who, through vicissitudes of marches, voyages, battles, and sieges, have been brought to suffer in mind, body, or estate, and finally to lead the whole nation, through the paths of repentance and submission to the Divine Will, back to the perfect enjoyment of Union and fraternal peace. In witness whereof," the Proclamation ended, "I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed."
Though it was in large part a reaction to the knowledge that the suffering and bloodshed of the past two years would continue indefinitely past the point at which he believed they could have been stopped, Lincoln"s extreme concern over the fact that one of his two great victories had been blunted was also based on fear that if he did not win the war in the field, and soon, he might lose it on the home front. There appeared to be excellent grounds for such apprehension. Ever since the fall elections, which had gone heavily against him in certain vital regions of the country, the loyal and disloyal opposition had been growing, not only in size but also in boldness, until now, in what might have been his hour of triumph, he was faced with the necessity for dealing with riots and other domestic troubles, the worst of which reached a climax in the nation"s largest city on the day he issued his Proclamation of Thanksgiving. Though he could a.s.sign a measure of the blame to Meade, whose timidity had cost him the chance, as Lincoln saw it, of ending the war with a single stroke, he knew well enough that the discontent had been c.u.mulative, the product of an almost unbroken seven-month sequence of military reverses, a good many of which he had engineered himself, and that the failure might be defined more reasonably as one of leadership at the top. Indeed, many did so define it, both in speeches and in print. During the past two years, while healing the split in his cabinet and winning the respect of those who were closest to him, he had grown in the estimation of the great ma.s.s of people who judged him solely from a distance, by his formal actions and utterances and by the gathering aura of his honesty and goodness. There were, however, senators and congressmen, together with other federal and State officiais of varying importance, who saw him only occasionally and were offended by what they saw.
"The lack of respect for the President in all parties is unconcealed," Richard Dana, a U.S. district attorney from Ma.s.sachusetts, had written home from the national capital at the beginning of a visit in late February. Author of Two Years Before the Mast, a founder of the Free Soil party and now a solid Republican, Dana spent two weeks looking and listening, then delivered himself of a still harsher judgment based on what he had seen and heard: "As to the politics of Washington, the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head. If a Republican convention were to be held tomorrow, he would not get the vote of a State. He does not act, or talk, or feel like the ruler of a great empire in a great crisis. This is felt by all, and has got down through all the layers of society. It has a disastrous effect on all departments and cla.s.ses of officials, as well as on the public. He seems to me to be fonder of details than of principles, of t.i.thing the mint, anise, and c.u.mmin of patronage, and personal questions, than of the weightier matters of empire. He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all sorts of persons who come to him for all sorts of purposes than to give his mind to the n.o.ble and manly duties of his great post. It is not difficult to detect that this is the feeling of his cabinet. He has a kind of shrewdness and common sense, mother wit, and slipshod, low-leveled honesty, that made him a good Western jury lawyer. But he is an unutterable calamity to us where he is. Only the army can save us."
If there was some perception here, there was also much distortion, and in any event the judgment was merely personal. More serious were the signs of organized obstruction. "Party spirit has resumed its sway over the people," Seward had lamented in the wake of the fall elections, and Sumner had written a friend soon after the turn of the year: "The President tells me that he now fears "the fire in the rear"-meaning the Democracy, especially at the Northwest-more than our military chances." When the Bay State senator spoke of "the Democracy" he meant the Democrats, particularly that wing of the party which opposed the more fervent innovations of his own: Emanc.i.p.ation, for example, and the draft. At any rate Lincoln"s anxiety seemed well founded. "I am advised," Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana had wired the Secretary of War, "that it is contemplated when the Legislature meets in this State to pa.s.s a joint resolution acknowledging the Southern Confederacy and urging the States of the Northwest to dissolve all const.i.tutional relations with the New England States. The same thing is on foot in Illinois." The same thing, or something resembling it, was indeed on foot in the President"s home state, where the legislature had likewise gone Democratic in the fall. However, though the Illinois house pa.s.sed resolutions praying for an armistice and recommending a convention of all the states North and South to agree upon some adjustment of their differences, the senate defeated by a few votes the proposal to discuss the matter; Governor Richard Yates was not obliged to exercise the veto. On the other hand, Morton did not allow matters to progress even that far in Indiana. He had spies in the opposition ranks, and when he saw what he believed was coming he dissolved the legislature by the simple expedient of advising the Republican minority to withdraw, which left the body without a quorum. The trouble with this was that it also left the Hoosier governor without funds for running the state for the next two years. But he solved the dilemma by strenuous and unconst.i.tutional efforts. After obtaining loans from private sources and the counties, amounting to $135,000 in all, he appealed to Lincoln for the necessary balance. Lincoln referred him to Stanton, who advanced him $250,000 from a special War Department fund. Morton had what he needed to keep Indiana loyal and going, though it bothered him some that the law had been severely bent if not broken in the process. "If the cause fails, you and I will be covered with prosecutions, imprisoned, driven from the country," he told Stanton, who replied: "If the cause fails I do not wish to live."
Stanton believed in rigorous methods, especially when it came to dealing with whatever seemed to him to smack or hint of treason, and he had been given considerable sway in that regard. Perceiving at the outset that the septuagenarian Bates was unequal to the task, Lincoln had put Seward in charge of maintaining internal security, which included the power to arrest all persons suspected of disloyalty in those regions where habeas corpus had been suspended despite the protest of the courts, including the Supreme Court itself. The genial New Yorker did an effective job, particularly in Maryland and Kentucky during their periods of attempted neutrality; judges and legislators, among others who seemed to the government or the government"s friends to favor the government"s enemies, were haled from their benches and chambers, sometimes from their beds, and clapped into prisons, more often than not without being told of the charges or who had preferred them. When protests reached Lincoln he turned them aside with a medical a.n.a.logy, pointing out that a limb must sometimes he amputated to save a life but that a life must never be given to save a limb; he felt, he said, "that measures, however unconst.i.tutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Const.i.tution, through the preservation of the nation." After Seward came Stanton, who a.s.sumed the security duties soon after he entered the cabinet in early "62. In addition to the fierce delight he took in crushing all advocates of disunion, he enjoyed the exercise of power for its own sake. "If I tap that little bell," he told a visitor, obviously relishing the notion, "I can send you to a place where you will never hear the dogs bark." Apparently the little bell rang often; a postwar search of the records disclosed the names of 13,535 citizens arrested and confined in various military prisons during Stanton"s tenure of office under Lincoln, while another survey (not concerned with names, and therefore much less valid) put the total at 38,000 for the whole period of the war. How many, if indeed any, of these unfortunates had been fairly accused-and, if so, what their various offenses had been-could never be known, either then or later, since not one of all those thousands was ever brought into a civil court for a hearing, although a few were sentenced by military tribunals.
One of these last was Ohio"s Vallandigham, who had continued to fulminate against the abuses of the minority by the majority, including the gerrymandering of his district by the addition of a Republican county, which had resulted in his defeat in the fall election. "I learned my judgment from Chatham: "My lords, you cannot conquer America." And you have not conquered the South. You never will.... The war for the Union is, in your hands, a most b.l.o.o.d.y and costly failure," he told his fellow congressmen during the following lame duck session. His main targets were the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation and the Conscription Act. With the former, he declared, "war for the Union was abandoned, war for the Negro openly begun, and with stronger battalions than before. With what success? Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer.... Will men enlist now at any price? Ah, sir, it is easier to die at home. I beg pardon, but I trust I am not "discouraging enlistments." If I am, then first arrest Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck and some of your other generals, and I will retract; yes, I will recant. But can you draft again? Ask New England, New York; ask Ma.s.sachusetts; [but] ask not Ohio, the Northwest. She thought you were in earnest, and gave you all, all-more than you demanded. Sir, in blood she has atoned for her credulity, and now there is mourning in every house and distress and sadness in every heart. Shall she give you any more? Ought this war to continue? I answer, no; not a day, not an hour. What then? Shall we separate? Again I answer, no no, no! What then? ... Stop fighting, Make an armistice."
So he counseled, and though a Republican member wrote in his diary that this was "a full exhibition of treason" and downright "submission to the rebels," Vallandigham and others like him considered themselves dedicated rather to opposing men like Thaddeus Stevens, whose avowed intent it was to "drive the present rebels as exiles from this country" and to "treat those states now outside of the Union as conquered provinces and settle them with new men." Democrats knew only too well who these "new men" would be: Republicans. To ask them to support this redefined conflict was asking them to complete the stripping of their minority of its former greatest strength, the coalition with conservatives of the South, and thus a.s.sure continuing domination by the radical majority down the years. Faced with this threat of political extinction, and having seen their friends arrested by thousands in defiance of their rights, diehard anti-Republicans banded together in secret organizations, especially in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where a prewar society known as "Knights of the Golden Circle," so called because it had been founded to promote the advancement of national interests around the sun-drenched rim of the Caribbean, was revived and enlarged; "Order of American Knights," its new members called it, and later changed the name again to "Sons of Liberty." Their purpose was to promote the success of the Democratic party-first in the North, while the war was on, and then in the South when it was over, which they hoped would be soon-and to preserve, as they said, "the Const.i.tution as it is, the Union as it was." By way of identification to one another, in addition to such intricate handclasps and unp.r.o.nounceable pa.s.swords as were common in secret fraternities, they wore on their lapels the head of Liberty cut from an old-style penny; "Copperheads," their enemies called them, in scornful reference to the poisonous reptile by that name.
Vallandigham was their champion, and when Congress adjourned in March he came home and addressed them from the stump, along the same lines he had followed in addressing his former colleagues. A tall man in his early forties, handsome and gifted as a speaker, with clear gray eyes, a mobile mouth, and a dark fringe of beard along his lower jaw and chin, he found his words greeted with more enthusiasm here than they had received in Washington, where one or another of his opponents had threatened from time to time to cut his throat. On May Day, with Hooker stalled in the Wilderness and Grant on the march across the Mississippi, the Ohioan addressed a crowd of thousands a.s.sembled in his home state for a ma.s.s Democratic meeting at Mount Vernon. He made a rousing speech, a.s.serting that the war could be concluded by negotiation but that the Republicans were prolonging the bloodshed for political purposes. The Union had gone by the board as a cause, he added; what was being fought for now, he said, was liberation of the blacks at the cost of enslaving the whites. This brought him more than the cheers of the crowd, which included a large number of men wearing copper Liberty heads in their b.u.t.tonholes. It also resulted, four days later-or rather three nights later, for the hour was 2.30 a.m. May 5-in his arrest by a full company of soldiers at his home in Dayton, by order of Major General Ambrose Burnside, commander of the Department of the Ohio.
Still smarting from the whips and scorns that followed Fredericksburg and the Mud March, the ruff-whiskered general had established headquarters in Cincinnati in late March and, outraged by Copperhead activities in the region, issued on April 13 a general order prescribing the death penalty for certain overt acts designed to aid or comfort the Confederacy. Moreover, he added, "the habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed.... It must be distinctly understood that treason, expressed or implied, will not be tolerated in this department." Then on May Day had come Vallandigham"s speech at Mount Vernon, reported to Burnside by two staff captains he had sent there in civilian clothes to take notes. Clearly this was a violation of the general order, and on May 4, without consulting his superiors or subordinates or even an attorney, he instructed an aide-de-camp to proceed at once to Dayton and arrest the offender. The aide boarded a special train, taking a company of soldiers along, and by 2.30 next morning was banging on Vallandigham"s door. Refused admittance, the soldiers broke it down, seized the former congressman in his bedroom, and carried him forthwith to prison in Cincinnati. Brought before a military commission eight days later-though he declined to plead, on grounds that the tribunal had no jurisdiction over a civilian-he was given a two-day trial, at the close of which he was found guilty of violating the general order and was sentenced to close confinement for the duration of the war. Burnside approved the findings and the sentence that same day, May 16, and designated Fort Warren in Boston Harbor as the place of incarceration.
From the outset, though he promptly a.s.sured the general of his "firm support," Lincoln had doubted the wisdom of the arrest. Now his doubts were abundantly confirmed. Vallandigham had declined to plead his case before the tribunal, but he did not hesitate to plead it before the public in statements issued from his cell in Cincinnati. Denouncing Burnside as the agent of a despot, he a.s.serted: "I am here in a military bastille for no other offense than my political opinions." Newspapers of various shades of opinion were quick to champion his basic right to freedom of speech, war or no war. As a result, he progressed overnight from regional to national prominence, his cause having been taken up by friends and sympathizers who sponsored rallies for him all across the land. Vallandigham in jail was a far more effective critic of the Administration than he had been at large; Lincoln was inclined to turn him loose, despite his previous a.s.surance of "firm support" for Burnside and his subsequent reply to a set of resolutions adopted at a protest meeting in Albany, New York: "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? ... I think that in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only const.i.tutional but withal a great mercy." However, this was leaving out of account the fact that the soldier and the agitator came under different codes of law, and the last thing Lincoln wanted just now was for the legality of Burnside"s general order to be tested in the civil courts. He cast about, and as usual he came up with a solution. Burnside had warned that offenders might be sent "beyond our lines and into the lines of their friends." Early the previous year, moreover, Jefferson Davis had done just that to Parson Brownlow, arrested under suspicion of treasonous activities in East Tennessee. Wherever the notion came from, Lincoln found in it the solution to his problem of what to do with Vallandigham, and on May 26 commuted his sentence to banishment, thereby creating the prototype for "The Man Without a Country." Soon afterwards, south of Murfreesboro, the Ohioan was delivered by a detachment of Federal cavalry, under a flag of truce, to a Confederate outpost north of Tullahoma. Informed that he could not remain in the South if he considered himself a loyal citizen of the Union, he made his way to Wilmington, where he boarded a blockade-runner bound for the West Indies. On July 5, two months after his arrest, he turned up in Nova Scotia. Ten days later-having been nominated unanimously for governor by the state Democratic convention, which had been held at Columbus in mid-June-he opened his campaign for election to that high office with an address to the people of Ohio, delivered from the Canadian side of the border at Niagara Falls. Under the British flag, he said, he enjoyed the rights denied him by "usurpers" at home, and he added that he intended to "return with my opinions and convictions ... not only unchanged, but confirmed and strengthened."
In time he did return, wearing false hair on his face and a large pillow strapped beneath his waistcoat. Presently he threw off these Falstaffian trappings and campaigned openly, despite the warning that the original sentence would be imposed if he broke the terms of his commutation. Lincoln did not molest him this time, however, nor would he allow the military to do so, having learned from the experience in May. Moreover, he had acted by then to prevent further unnecessary roiling of the citizenry by Burnside. In early June, encouraged by his apparent success in suppressing freedom of speech in his department, the general moved against the press in a similar heavy-handed manner. At 3 o"clock in the morning, June 3, cavalry vedettes rode up to the offices of the Chicago Times, which he had charged with "repeated expression of disloyalty and incendiary statements." Reinforced an hour later by two companies of infantry from Camp Douglas, they stopped the presses, destroyed the papers already printed, and announced that the Times was out of business. The reaction was immediate and uproarious. A noon meeting of prominent Chicagoans, presided over by the mayor, voted unanimously to request the President to revoke the suppression, and in Court House Square that evening a crowd of "20,000 loyal citizens," including many Republicans, gathered to hear speeches against such arbitrary seizures of power by the military and to cheer the news that in Springfield that afternoon the legislature had denounced the general for his action. Confronted with such outbursts of indignation, which seemed likely to spread rapidly beyond his home-state borders, much as the Vallandigham affair had spread beyond the borders of Ohio, Lincoln rescinded Burnside"s order the following morning. What was more, he followed this up by having Stanton direct his over-zealous subordinate to arrest no more civilians and suppress no more newspapers without first securing the approval of the War Department.
In all conscience, he had troubles enough on his hands without the help or hindrance of the fantastically whiskered general in Cincinnati, whose brief foray against the Illinois paper was by no means an isolated example of all-out censorship. From start to finish, despite Lincoln"s instructions for department commanders to exercise "great caution, calmness, and forbearance" in the matter, no less than 300 newspapers large and small, including such influential publications as the New York World, the Louisville Courier, the New Orleans Crescent, the Baltimore Gazette, and the Philadelphia Evening Journal-Democratic all-were suppressed or suspended for a variety of offenses, ranging from the usual "extension of aid or comfort to the enemy" to the release of a bogus proclamation which had the President calling for "400,000 more." In thus increasing the public"s apprehension of an extension of the draft, he was treading on dangerous ground-dangerous to the government, that is-for nothing so inflamed resentment as did the Conscription Act which Congress had pa.s.sed in early March and which had begun to be placed in operation by early summer. This resentment was directed less against the draft itself, which was plainly necessary, than it was against the way the act was written and administered. Actually, though it provoked a good deal of volunteering by men who sought to avoid the stigma of being drafted and the discomfort of not being able to choose their branch of service, it was far from effective in accomplishing its avowed purpose, as postwar records would show; 86,724 individuals escaped by paying the $300 commutation fee, while of the 168,649 actually drafted, 117,986 were hired subst.i.tutes, leaving a total of 50,663 men personally conscripted, and of these only 46,347 went into the ranks. Though barely enough to make up the losses of two Gettysburgs, draftees and subst.i.tutes combined amounted to less than ten percent of the force the Union had under arms in the course of the war; in fact, they fell far short of compensating for the 201,397 deserters, many of whom had been drafted in the first place. However, the popular furor against conscription was provoked not by its end results, which of course were unknown at the time, but rather by the vexations involved in its enforcement, which brought the naked power of military government into play on the home front and went very much against the national grain. While provost marshals conducted house-to-house searches, often without the formality of warrants, boards of officers sentenced drafted boys as deserters for failing to report for induction, and troops were used without restraint to break up formal protest meetings as well as rowdy demonstrations. In retaliation, conscription officials were roughed up on occasion, a few being shot from ambush as they went about their duties, and others had their property destroyed by angry mobs, all in the good old American way dating back to the Revolution. So-called "insurrections," staged at scattered points throughout the North, invariably met with harshness at the hands of soldiers who did not always bother to discriminate between foreign and domestic "rebels," especially when brought back from the front to deal with this new home-grown variety. In mid-June, for example, an uprising in Holmes County, Ohio, was quelled so rigorously by the troops called in for that purpose that their colonel felt obliged to account for their enthusiasm when he made his report of the affair. "The irregularities committed by some of the men," he wrote, "were owing more to their having campaigned in the South than to any intention on their part of violating my express orders to respect private property."
This rash of draft disturbances, which broke out during the long hot summer leading up to and continuing beyond the two great early-July victories, was by no means limited to the Old Northwest or the Ohio Valley, where secret societies were most active in opposition to the Administration and its measures. Boston and Newark had their clamorous mobs, as did Albany and Troy, New York, and Columbia and Bucks counties, Pennsylvania. There were uprisings in Kentucky and New Hampshire, and the governor of Wisconsin had to call out the state militia to deal with demonstrations in Milwaukee and Ozaukee County, where immigrants from Belgium, Holland, and Germany, especially vigorous in resisting what they had left Europe to escape, attacked the draft headquarters with guns and clubs and stones. By far the greatest of all the riots, however, was the one that exploded in New York City, hard on the heels of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, while Lincoln was writing his sent and unsent letters to Grant and Meade. Partly the trouble was political; protests had been made by party orators that Democratic districts were being required to furnish more than their fair share of conscripts and that ballot boxes were being stuffed with imported Republican soldier votes. Partly, too, it was racial; charges were also made that Negro suffrage was a device for overthrowing the white majority, including Tammany Hall, and that Negroes were being shipped in from the South to throw the Tammany-loyal workers, mostly Irish, out of work. Whatever began it, the three-day riot soon degenerated into violence for its own sake. On Monday, July 13, a mob wrecked the draft office where the drawing of names had begun two days before, then moved on to the Second Avenue armory, which was seized and looted, along with jewelry stores and liquor shops. By nightfall, with the police force overpowered, much of the upper East Side had been overrun. Segments of the mob were reported to be "chasing isolated Negroes as hounds would chase a fox," and the chase generally ended beneath a lamppost, which served conveniently as a gibbet. All next day this kind of thing continued, and nearly all of the next. A colored orphanage was set afire and the rioters cheered the leaping flames, seeing the Negroes not only as rivals for their jobs but also as the prime cause of the war. According to one witness of their fury, "three objects-the badge of a defender of the law, the uniform of the Union army, the skin of a helpless and outraged race-acted upon these madmen as water acts upon a rabid dog." By morning of the third day, however, representatives of all three of these hated categories were rare. The mob had undisputed control of the city.
In Washington, Lincoln and Stanton reacted to news of the violence by detaching troops from Meade to deal with the situation. They arrived on Wednesday evening and got to work at once. "We saw the grim batteries and weatherstained and dusty soldiers tramping into our leading streets as if into a town just taken by siege," another witness recorded in his diary. According to him, the action was brief and b.l.o.o.d.y. "There was some terrific fighting between the regulars and the insurgents; streets were swept again and again by grape, houses were stormed at the point of the bayonet, rioters were picked off by sharpshooters as they fired on the troops from housetops; men were hurled, dying or dead, into the streets by the thoroughly enraged soldiery; until at last, sullen and cowed and thoroughly whipped and beaten, the miserable wretches gave way at every point and confessed the power of the law." Estimates of the casualties ranged from less than 300 to more than 1000, though some Democrats later protested that the figures had been enlarged by Republican propagandists and that there was "no evidence that any more than 74 possible victims of the violence of the three days died anywhere but in the columns of partisan newspapers." Whether the dead were few or many, one thing was clear: Lincoln was determined to enforce the draft. "The government will be able to stand the test," Stanton had replied by wire to Mayor George Opd.y.k.e"s request for troops at the height of the trouble, "even if there should be a riot and mob in every ward of every city."
Conscription resumed on schedule, August 19, and though there was grumbling, there was no further violence in the nation"s largest city; the Secretary had seen to the fulfillment of his prediction by sending in more troops, with orders to crack down hard if there was any semblance of resistance. Lincoln stood squarely behind him, having denied Governor Horatio Seymour"s plea for a suspension of the draft. "Time is too important," he told the Democratic leader, and while he agreed to look into the claim that the state"s quota was unfair, he made it clear that there would be no delay for that or any other purpose. "We are contending with an enemy who, as I understand, drives every able-bodied man he can reach into his ranks, very much as a butcher drives bullocks into a slaughter pen. No time is wasted, no argument is used. This produces an army ... with a rapidity not to be matched on our side if we first waste time to re-experiment with the volunteer system." His intention, he said in closing, was to be "just and const.i.tutional, and yet practical, in performing the important duty with which I am charged, of maintaining the unity and free principles of our common country." And so it was. Under Lincoln there was Stanton, and under Stanton there was Provost Marshal General James B. Fry, who headed a newly created bureau of the War Department. Under Fry, in charge of enrollment districts corresponding roughly to congressional districts all across the land, were the provost marshals, who were responsible not only for the functioning of the conscription process but also for the maintenance of internal security within their individual districts. Each could call on his neighboring marshals for help in case of trouble, as well as on Fry in Washington, and Fry in turn could call on Stanton, who was prepared to lend the help of the army if it was needed and the Commander in Chief approved. Lincoln"s long arm now reached into every home in the North, as well as into every home in the South that lay in the wake of his advancing armies, east and west.
Now that he had had time to absorb the shock Lee"s getaway had given him, he felt better about the outcome of the battle in Pennsylvania and the capacity of the general who had won it. Though he was still regretful-"We had gone through all the labor of tilling and planting an enormous crop," he complained, "and when it was ripe we did not harvest it"-he was also grateful. That was the word he used: saying, "I am very grateful to Meade for the service he did at Gettysburg," and asking: "Why should we censure a man who has done so much for his country because he did not do a little more?" All the same, he could scarcely help contrasting the eastern victory with the western one, which had left him not even "a little more" to wish for. Nor could he avoid comparing the two commanders. More and more, he was coming to see Grant as the answer to his military problem: not only because of his obvious talent, demonstrated in the capture of two rebel armies intact, but also because of his att.i.tude toward his work. For example, when Lorenzo Thomas was sent to Mississippi to direct the recruiting of Negro troops, Grant had been instructed to a.s.sist him, and though he said quite frankly, "I never was an abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery," he had replied forthrightly: "You may rely upon it I will give him all the aid in my power. I would do this whether the arming the negro seemed to me a wise policy or not, because it is an order that I am bound to obey and I do not feel that in my position I have a right to question any policy of the government."
Lincoln liked the tone of that. In contrast to the petulance he had encountered in his dealings with five of the six commanders of the eastern army (McDowell, the exception, had also turned sour in the end, after two months of service under Pope) Grant had the sound of a man he could enjoy working closely with, and apparently he had the notion of bringing him East, although Halleck and Charles Dana, who had returned to Washington shortly after the fall of Vicksburg, were certain that the general would prefer to continue his service in the West. Presently there was first-hand evidence that such was indeed the case; for Dana wrote to Grant in late July, telling him what was afoot, and got a reply in early August. "General Halleck and yourself were both very right in supposing that it would cause me more sadness than satisfaction to be ordered to the command of the Army of the Potomac. Here I know the officers and men and what each general is capable of as a separate commander. There I would have all to learn. Here I know the geography of the country and its resources. There it would be a new study. Besides, more or less dissatisfaction would necessarily be produced by importing a general to command an army already well supplied with those who have grown up, and been promoted, with it.... While I would disobey no order, I should beg very hard to be excused before accepting that command." This too was forthright; the President, if he saw the letter, was left in no doubt as to Grant"s own preference in the matter. At any rate Lincoln decided to stick with Meade for the time being, much as he had done with Burnside and Hooker after telling a friend that "he was not disposed to throw away a gun because it missed fire once; that he would pick the lock and try it again." Grant would keep, Grant would be there in case he was needed; Grant was his ace in the hole.
Meanwhile there was the war to get on with, on the political front as well as on the firing line. In mid-June out in Illinois, at the height of the Vallandigham controversy and two weeks after Burnside"s suppression of the Chicago Times, a monster protest rally had been staged in Lincoln"s own home town; Copperhead orators had whipped the a.s.sembly into frenzies of applause, and the meeting had closed with the adoption of peace resolutions. Now, with the fall elections drawing near, Republicans were calling for loyal Democrats to join them, under the banner of a "National Union" party, in campaigning for support of the Administration"s war aims. They planned a record-breaking turnout at Springfield in early September, to offset whatever effect the previous gathering might have had on voters of the region, and the arrangements committee invited Lincoln to come out and speak. He considered going-after all, except for military conferences, he had not left Washington once in the thirty months he had been there-but found the press of business far too great. Instead, he decided in late August to write a letter to the chairman of the committee, James Conkling, to be read to the a.s.sembly and pa.s.sed on to the rest of the country by the newspapers, giving his views on the conflict at its present stage. He began by expressing his grat.i.tude to those "whom no partizan malice, or partizan hope, can make false to the nation"s life," then pa.s.sed at once, since peace seemed uppermost in men"s minds nowadays, to a discussion of "three conceivable ways" in which it could be brought about. First, by suppressing the rebellion; "This I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed." Second, by giving up the Union; "I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly." Third, by negotiating some sort of armistice based on compromise with the Confederates; but "I do not believe any compromise, embracing the maintenance of the Union, is now possible. All I learn leads to a directly opposite belief."
After disposing thus, to his apparent satisfaction, of the possibility of achieving peace except by force of arms, he moved on to another matter which his opponents had lately been harping on as a source of dissatisfaction: Emanc.i.p.ation. "You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the Proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to free negroes. I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do, as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive-even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept."
And having progressed so far in what an a.s.sociate called a "stump speech" delivered by proxy, Lincoln pa.s.sed to the peroration. Here he broke into a sort of verbal buck-and-wing: The signs look better. The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great Northwest for it. Nor yet wholly to them. Three hundred miles up, they met New England, Empire, Keystone, and Jersey, hewing their way right and left. The Sunny South, too, in more colors than one, also lent a hand. On the spot, their part of the history was jotted down in black and white. The job was a great national one, and let none be banned who bore an honorable part in it. And while those who have cleared the great river may well be proud, even that is not all. It is hard to say that anything has been more bravely and well done than at Antietam, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg, and on many fields of lesser note. Nor must Uncle Sam"s web-feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been and made their tracks. Thanks to all. For the great republic, for the principle it lives by and keeps alive, for man"s vast future-thanks to all.
Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay, and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost. And then there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue and clenched teeth and steady eye and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation, while I fear there will be some white ones unable to forget that, with malignant heart and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.
Still, let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just G.o.d, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result.
5.
In their first reports of Gettysburg, southern newspapers hailed the battle as a climactic triumph. "A brilliant and crushing victory has been achieved," the Charleston Mercury exulted on July 8, and two days later the Richmond Examiner informed its readers that the Army of Northern Virginia, with upwards of 30,000 prisoners in tow, was on the march for Baltimore. Presently, when it was learned that the graybacks had withdrawn instead to the Potomac, these and other southern journals a.s.sured the public that there was "nothing bad in this news beyond a disappointment"; Lee, whose "retrograde movement" had been "dictated by strategy and prudence," was "perfectly master of the situation." Though the victory "had not been decisive" because of "the semblance of a retreat," the outcome of the Pennsylvania conflict remained "favorable to the South." Not until the last week of the month did the Examiner refer to the "repulse at Gettysburg." By that time, however, the Mercury"s editor had also come full circle and like his Richmond colleague had recovered, through hindsight, his accustomed position as an acid critic of the Administration"s conduct of the war. "It is impossible for an invasion to have been more foolish and disastrous," he p.r.o.nounced.
For the most part, Lee"s weary soldiers were content to leave such public judgments to the home-front critics, but privately there were some who agreed with the angry Carolinian. They had been mishandled and they knew it. "The campaign is a failure," a Virginia captain wrote home on his return to native soil, "and the worst failure the South has ever made. Gettysburg sets off Fredericksburg. Lee seems to have become as weak as Burnside. And no blow since the fall of New Orleans had been so telling against us." News of the loss of Vicksburg, which the strike across the Potomac had been designed in part to prevent, served to deepen the gloom, especially for those whose lofty posts afforded them a long-range view of the probable consequences. Longstreet, for example, wrote years later, looking back: "This surrender, taken in connection with the Gettysburg defeat, was, of course, very discouraging to our superior officers, though I do not know that it was felt as keenly by the rank and file. For myself, I felt that our last hope was gone, and that it was now only a question of time with us." Officials in Richmond also were staggered by the double blow, and of these perhaps the hardest hit was Seddon, who had put his faith in Johnston. Nowadays, according to a War Department clerk, the Secretary resembled "a galvanized corpse which has been buried two months. The circles around his eyes are absolutely black." Others about the office were as grim, particularly after reading the preliminary reports of the commanders in the field. "Gettysburg has shaken my faith in Lee as a general," R. G. H. Kean, chief of the Bureau of War, recorded in his diary on July 26. "To fight an enemy superior in numbers at such terrible disadvantage of position in the heart of his own territory, when the freedom of movement gave him the advantage of selecting his own time and place for accepting battle, seems to have been a great military blunder. [Moreover] the battle was worse in execution than in plan.... G.o.d help this unhappy country!" Two days later another high-placed diarist, Chief of Ordnance Josiah Gorgas, who had worked brilliantly and hard to provide the enormous amounts of materiel lost or expended, west and east, confessed an even darker view of the situation. "It seems incredible that human power could effect such a change in so brief a s.p.a.ce," he lamented. "Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success; today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction."
The one exception was Davis, who neither contributed to nor shared in the prevailing atmosphere of gloom that settled over the capital as a result of the triphammer blows struck by the Federals east and west. It was not that he failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, the extent and intensity of the danger in both directions. He did. "We are now in the darkest hour of our political existence," he admitted in mid-July. Rather, it was as if defeat, even disaster, whatever else it brought, also brought release from dread and a curious inverse lift of the spirit after a time of strain which had begun with Grant"s crossing of the Mississippi River and the death of Stonewall Jackson. Visitors to the White House in mid-May found him "thin and frail and gaunt with grief," and the tension increased tremendously when Vicksburg was besieged and Lee started north on June 3, the President"s fifty-fifth birthday. Mrs Davis said afterwards that throughout this time her husband was "a prey to the acutest anxiety": so much so, indeed, that he found it nearly intolerable to have to wait deskbound in Richmond while his and the nation"s fate was perhaps being decided in Pennsylvania and far-off Mississippi. He yearned for the field, a return to his first profession, and like Lincoln-who would declare somewhat later, under a similar press of anxiety: "If I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself"-he considered personal intervention. At any rate he expressed such a hope aloud, if only to his wife. "If I could take one wing and Lee the other," she heard him say one hot June night, "I think we could between us wrest a victory from those people." But that was not to be, either for him or his opponent, though presently there was disquieting news from Bragg and Buckner that Rosecrans and Burnside were on the march in Middle and East Tennessee, and hard on the heels of this came the first vague reports of Lee"s retreat and Pemberton"s surrender. Moreover, on July 10, when Vicksburg"s fall was officially confirmed and Lee reported his army marooned on the hostile northern bank of the Potomac, bad news arrived from still another quarter. Beauregard wired that the enemy had effected a sudden lodgment on Morris Island; Fort Wagner had not been taken, the Creole declared, but the build-up and the pressure were unrelenting. Three days later, however, with Bragg in full retreat and the possible loss of Charleston increasing the strain on the President"s frayed nerves, word came from Lee that his army was over the swollen river at last and back on the soil of Virginia, unpursued. Davis seized upon this one gleam of brightness in the gloom, and the clerk who had noted the black circles around Seddon"s eyes recorded in his diary: "The President is quite amiable now. The newspaper editors can find easy access and he welcomes them with a smile."
There was more to this than a grasping at straws, though of course there was that as well; nor was his smile altogether forced, though of course it was in part. Davis saw in every loss of mere territory a corresponding gain, if only in the sense that what had been lost no longer required defending. Just as the early fall of Nashville and New Orleans had permitted a tighter concentration of the Confederacy"s limited military resources and had given its field commanders more freedom of action by reducing the number of fixed positions they were obliged to defend, so might the loss of the Mississippi make the defense of what remained at once more compact and more fluid. What remained after all was the heartland. Contracted though its borders were, from the Richmond apex south through the Carolinas to Savannah on the Atlantic and southwest through East Tennessee and Alabama to Mobile on the Gulf, the nation"s productive center remained untouched. There the mills continued to grind out powder, forge guns, weave cloth; there were grown the crops and cattle that would feed the armies; there on the two seaboards were the ports into which the blockade-runners steamed. In the final a.n.a.lysis, as Davis saw it, everything else was extra-even his home state, which now was reduced to serving as a buffer. Besides, merely because the far western portion of the country had been severed from the rest, it did not follow that the severed portion would die or even, necessarily, stop fighting. In point of fact, some of the advantages he saw accruing to the East as a result of the amputation might also obtain in the Transmississippi, if only the leaders there were as determined as he himself was. Accordingly, after making himself accessible to the Richmond editors so that they might spread these newest views among the defenders of the heartland, he took as his first task next day, July 14, the writing of a series of letters designed to encourage resolution among the leaders and people whose duties and homes lay beyond the great river just fallen to the Union.
Of these several letters the first went to Kirby Smith, commander of that vast region which in time would be known as Kirby-Smithdom. "You now have not merely a military, but also a political problem involved in your command," Davis told him, and went on to suggest that necessity be made a virtue and a source of strength. Cut off as it was, except by sea, the Transmississippi "must needs be to a great extent self-sustaining," he wrote, urging the development of new plants in the interior to manufacture gun carriages and wagons, tan leather for shoes and harness, and weave cloth for uniforms and blankets, as well as the establishment of a rolling mill for the production of ironclad vessels, "which will enable you in some contingencies to a.s.sume the offensive" on the Arkansas and the Red. In any case, he added, "the endurance of our people is to be sorely tested, and nothing will serve more to encourage and sustain them than a zealous application of their industry to the task of producing within themselves whatever is necessary for their comfortable existence. And in proportion as the country exhibits a power to sustain itself, so will the men able to bear arms be inspired with a determination to repel invasion.... May G.o.d guide and preserve you," the long letter ended, "and grant to us a future in which we may congratulate each other on the achievement of the independence and peace of our country." This was followed by almost as long a letter to Theophilus Holmes, the only one of Smith"s three chief subordinates who had suffered a defeat. Far from indulging in criminations for the botched a.s.sault on Helena, the details of which were not yet known in Richmond, Davis chose rather "to renew to you the