We have come, however, to the end, not of all the clamour against Lincoln, but of his own worst perplexities. In passing to the operations further west we are passing to an instance in which Lincoln felt it right to stand to the end by a decried commander, and that decried commander proved to possess the very qualities for which he had vainly looked in others. The reverse side of General Grant's fame is well enough known to the world. Before the war he had been living under a cloud. In the autumn of 1862, while his army lay between Corinth and Memphis, the cloud still rested on his reputation. In spite of the glory he had won for a moment at Fort Donelson, large circles were ready to speak of him simply as an "incompetent and disagreeable man." The crowning work of his life was accomplished with terrible bloodshed which was often attributed to callousness and incapacity on his part. The eight years of his Presidency afterwards, which cannot properly be discussed here, added at the best no lustre to his memory. Later still, when he visited Europe as a celebrity the general impression which he created seems to be contained in the words "a rude man." Thus the Grant that we discover in the recollections of a few loyal and loving friends, and in the memoirs which he himself began when late in life he lost his money and which he finished with the pains of death upon him, is a surprising, in some ways pathetic, figure. He had been a shy country boy, ready enough at all the work of a farm and good with horses, but with none of the business aptitude that make a successful farmer, when his father made him go to West Point. Here he showed no great promise and made few friends; his health became delicate, and he wanted to leave the army and become a teacher of mathematics. But the Mexican War, one of the most unjust in all history, as he afterwards said, broke out, and—so he later thought—saved his life from consumption by keeping him in the open air. After that he did retire, failed at farming and other ventures, and at thirty-nine, when the Civil War began, was as has been seen, a shabby-looking, shiftless fellow, pretty far gone in the habit of drink, and more or less occupied about a leather business of his father's. Rough in appearance and in manner he remained—the very opposite of smart, the very opposite of versatile, the very opposite of expansive in speech or social intercourse. Unlike many rough people, he had a really simple character—truthful, modest, and kind; without varied interests, or complicated emotions, or much sense of fun, but thinking intensely on the problems that he did see before him, and in his silent way keenly sensitive on most of the points on which it is well to be sensitive. His friends reckoned up the very few occasions on which he was ever seen to be angry; only one could be recalled on which he was angry on his own account; the cruelty of a driver to animals in his supply train, heartless neglect in carrying out the arrangements he had made for the comfort of the sick and wounded, these were the sort of occasions which broke down Grant's habitual self-possession and good temper. "He was never too anxious," wrote Chaplain Eaton, who, having been set by him in charge of the negro refugees with his army, had excellent means of judging, "never too preoccupied with the great problems that beset him, to take a sincere and humane interest in the welfare of the most subordinate labourer dependent upon him." And he had delicacy of feeling in other ways. Once in the crowd at some hotel, in which he mingled an undistinguished figure, an old officer under him tried on a lecherous story for the entertainment of the General, who did not look the sort of man to resent it; Grant, who did not wish to set down an older man roughly, and had no ready phrases, but had, as it happens, a sensitive skin, was observed to blush to the roots of his hair in exquisite discomfort. It would be easy to multiply little recorded traits of this somewhat unexpected kind, which give grace to the memory of his determination in a duty which became very grim.
The simplicity of character as well as manner which endeared him to a few close associates was probably a very poor equipment for the Presidency, which, from that very simplicity, he afterwards treated as his due; and Grant presented in some ways as great a contrast as can be imagined to the large and complex mind of Lincoln. But he was the man that Lincoln had yearned for. Whatever degree of military skill may be ascribed to him, he had in the fullest measure the moral attributes of a commander. The sense that the war could be put through and must be put through possessed his soul. He was insusceptible to personal danger—at least, so observers said, though he himself told a different story—and he taught himself to keep a quiet mind in the presence of losses, rout in battle, or failure in a campaign. It was said that he never troubled himself with fancies as to what the enemy might be doing, and he confessed to having constantly told himself that the enemy was as much afraid of him as he of the enemy. His military talent was doubled in efficacy by his indomitable constancy. In one sense, moreover, and that a wholly good sense, he was a political general; for he had constantly before his mind the aims of the Government which employed him, perceiving early that there were only two possible ends to the war, the complete subjugation of the South or the complete failure of the Union; perceiving also that there was no danger of exhausting the resources of the North and great danger of discouraging its spirit, while the position of the South was in this respect the precise contrary. He was therefore the better able to serve the State as a soldier, because throughout he measured by a just standard the ulterior good or harm of success or failure in his enterprises.
The affectionate confidence which existed between Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson till the latter was killed at Chancellorsville had a parallel in the endearing friendship which sprung up between Grant and his principal subordinate, William T. Sherman, who was to bear a hardly less momentous part than his own in the conclusion of the war. Sherman was a man of quick wits and fancy, bright and mercurial disposition, capable of being a delightful companion to children, and capable of being sharp and inconsiderate to duller subordinates. It is a high tribute both to this brilliant soldier and to Grant himself that he always regarded Grant as having made him, not only by his confidence but by his example.
As has been said, Grant was required to remain on the defensive between Memphis and Corinth, which mark the line of the Northern frontier at this period, while Buell was advancing on Chattanooga. Later, while the Confederates were invading Kentucky further east, attacks were also directed against Grant to keep him quiet. These were defeated, though Grant was unable to follow up his success at the time. When the invasion of Kentucky had collapsed and the Confederates under Bragg were retreating before Buell and his successor out of Middle Tennessee, it became possible for Grant and for Halleck and the Government at Washington to look to completing the conquest of the Mississippi River. The importance to the Confederates of a hold upon the Mississippi has been pointed out; if it were lost the whole of far South-West would manifestly be lost with it; in the North, on the other hand, public sentiment was strongly set upon freeing the navigation of the great river. The Confederacy now held the river from the fortress of Vicksburg, which after taking New Orleans Admiral Farragut had attacked in vain, down to Port Hudson, 120 miles further south, where the Confederate forces had since then seized and fortified another point of vantage. Vicksburg, it will be observed, lies 175 to 180 miles south of Memphis, or from Grand Junction, between Memphis and Corinth, the points in the occupation of the North which must serve Grant as a base. At Vicksburg itself, and for some distance south of it, a line of bluffs or steep-sided hills lying east of the Mississippi comes right up to the edge of the river. The river as it approaches these bluffs makes a sudden bend to the north-east and then again to the south-west, so that two successive reaches of the stream, each from three to four miles long, were commanded by the Vicksburg guns, 200 feet above the valley; the eastward or landward side of the fortress was also well situated for defence. To the north of Vicksburg the country on the east side of the Mississippi is cut up by innumerable streams and "bayous" or marshy creeks, winding and intersecting amid a dense growth of cedars. The North, with a flotilla under Admiral Porter, commanded the Mississippi itself, and the Northern forces could freely move along its western shore to the impregnable river face of Vicksburg beyond. But the question of how to get safely to the assailable side of Vicksburg presented formidable difficulty to Grant and to the Government.
Grant's operations began in November, 1862. Advancing directly southward along the railway from Memphis with the bulk of his forces, he after a while detached Sherman with a force which proceeded down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Yazoo, a little north-west of Vicksburg. Here Sherman was to land, and, it was hoped, surprise the enemy at Vicksburg itself while the bulk of the enemy's forces were fully occupied by Grant's advance from the north. But Grant's lengthening communications were cut up by a cavalry raid, and he had to retreat, while Sherman came upon an enemy fully prepared and sustained a defeat a fortnight after Burnside's defeat at Fredericksburg. This was the first of a long series of failures during which Grant, who for his part was conspicuously frank and loyal in his relations with the Government, received upon the whole the fullest confidence and support from them. There occurred, however, about this time an incident which was trying to Grant, and of which the very simple facts must be stated, since it was the last of the occasions upon which severe criticism of Lincoln's military administration has been founded. General McClernand was an ambitious Illinois lawyer-politician of energy and courage; he was an old acquaintance of Lincoln's, and an old opponent; since the death of Douglas he and another lawyer-politician, Logan, had been the most powerful of the Democrats in Illinois; both were zealous in the war and had joined the Army upon its outbreak. Logan served as a general under Grant with confessed ability. It must be repeated that, North and South, former civilians had to be placed in command for lack of enough soldiers of known capacity to go round, and that many of them, like Logan and like the Southern general, Polk, who was a bishop in the American Episcopal Church, did very good service. McClernand had early obtained high rank and had shown no sign as yet of having less aptitude for his new career than other men of similar antecedents. Grant, however, distrusted him, and proved to be right. In October, 1862, McClernand came to Lincoln with an offer of his personal services in raising troops from Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa, with a special view to clearing the Mississippi. He of course expected to be himself employed in this operation. Recruiting was at a low ebb, and it would have been folly to slight this offer. McClernand did in fact raise volunteers to the number of a whole army corps. He was placed under Grant in command of the expedition down the Mississippi which had already started under Sherman. Sherman's great promise had not yet been proved to any one but Grant; he appears at this time to have come under the disapproval of the Joint Committee of Congress on the War, and the newspaper Press had not long before announced, with affected regret, the news that he had become insane. McClernand, arriving just after Sherman's defeat near Vicksburg, fell in at once with a suggestion of his to attack the Post of Arkansas, a Confederate stronghold in the State of Arkansas and upon the river of that name, from the shelter of which Confederate gunboats had some chance of raiding the Mississippi above Vicksburg. The expedition succeeded in this early in January, 1863, and was then recalled to join Grant. This was a mortification to McClernand, who had hoped for a command independent of Grant. In his subsequent conduct he seems to have shown incapacity; he was certainly insubordinate to Grant, and he busied himself in intrigues against him, with such result as will soon be seen. As soon as Grant told the Administration that he was dissatisfied with McClernand, he was assured that he was at liberty to remove him from command. This he eventually did after some months of trial.
In the first three months of 1863, while the army of the Potomac, shattered at Fredericksburg, was being prepared for the fresh attack upon Lee which ended at Chancellorsville, and while Bragg and Rosecrans lay confronting each other in Middle Tennessee, each content that the other was afraid to weaken himself by sending troops to the Mississippi, Grant was occupied in a series of enterprises apparently more cautious than that in which he eventually succeeded, but each in its turn futile. An attempt was made to render Vicksburg useless by a canal cutting across the bend of the Mississippi to the west of that fortress. Then Grant endeavoured with the able co-operation of Admiral Porter and his flotilla to secure a safe landing on the Yazoo, which enters the Mississippi a little above Vicksburg, so that he could move his army to the rear of Vicksburg by this route. Next Grant and Porter tried to establish a sure line of water communication from a point far up the Mississippi through an old canal, then somehow obstructed, into the upper waters of the Yazoo and so to a point on that river 30 or 40 miles to the north-east of Vicksburg, by which they would have turned the right of the main Confederate force; but this was frustrated by the Confederates, who succeeded in establishing a strong fort further up the Yazoo. Yet a further effort was made to establish a waterway by a canal quitting the Mississippi about 40 miles north of Vicksburg and communicating, through lakes, bayous, and smaller rivers, with its great tributary the Red River far to the south. This, like the first canal attempted, would have rendered Vicksburg useless.
Each of these projects failed in turn. The tedious engineering work which two of them involved was rendered more depressing by adverse conditions of weather and by ill-health among Grant's men. Natural grumbling among the troops was repeated and exaggerated in the North. McClernand employed the gift for intrigue, which perhaps had helped him to secure his command, in an effort to get Grant removed. It is melancholy to add that a good many newspapers at this time began to print statements that Grant had again taken to drink. It is certain that he was at this time a total abstainer. It is said that he had offended the authors of this villainy by the restrictions which he had long before found necessary to put upon information to the Press. Some of the men freely confessed afterwards that they had been convinced of his sobriety, and added the marvellous apology that their business was to give the public "the news." Able and more honest journalists urged that Grant had proved his incompetence. Secretary Chase took up their complaints and pressed that Grant should be removed. Lincoln, before the outcry against Grant had risen to its height, had felt the need of closer information than he possessed about the situation on the Mississippi; and had hit upon the happy expedient of sending an able official of the War Department, who deserved and obtained the confidence of Grant and his officers, to accompany the Western army and report to him. Apart, however, from the reports he thus received, he had always treated the attacks on Grant with contempt. "I cannot spare this general; he fights," he said. In reply to complaints that Grant drank, he enquired (adapting, as he knew, George II.'s famous saying about Wolfe) what whisky he drank, explaining that he wished to send barrels of it to some of his other generals. His attitude is remarkable, because in his own mind he had not thought well of any of Grant's plans after his first failure in December; he had himself wished from an early day that Grant would take the very course by which he ultimately succeeded. He let him go his own way, as he afterwards told him, from "a general hope that you know better than I."
At the end of March Grant took a memorable determination to transfer his whole force to the south of Vicksburg and approach it from that direction. He was urged by Sherman to give up any further attempt to use the river, and, instead, to bring his whole army back to Memphis and begin a necessarily slow approach on Vicksburg by the railway. He declared himself that on ordinary grounds of military prudence this would have been the proper course, but he decided for himself that the depressing effect of the retreat to Memphis would be politically disastrous. At Grand Gulf, 30 miles south of Vicksburg, the South possessed another fortified post on the river; to reach this Grant required the help of the Navy, not only in crossing from the western bank of the river, but in transporting the supplies for which the roads west of the river were inadequate. Admiral Porter, with his gunboats and laden barges, successfully ran the gauntlet of the Vicksburg batteries by night without serious damage. Grand Gulf was taken on May 3, and Grant's army established at this new base. A further doubt now arose. General Banks in Louisiana was at this time preparing to besiege Port Hudson. It might be well for Grant to go south and join him, and, after reducing Port Hudson, return with Banks' forces against Vicksburg. This was what now commended itself to Lincoln. In the letter of congratulation which some time later he was able to send to Grant, after referring to his former opinion which had been right, he confessed that he had now been wrong. Banks was not yet ready to move, and Vicksburg, now seriously threatened, might soon be reinforced. Orders to join Banks, though they were probably meant to be discretionary, were actually sent to Grant, but too late. He had cut himself loose from his base at Grand Gulf and marched his troops north, to live with great hardship to themselves on the country and the supplies they could take with them. He had with him 35,000 men. General Pemberton, to whom he had so far been opposed, lay covering Vicksburg with 20,000 and a further force in the city; Joseph Johnston, whom he afterwards described as the Southern general who in all the war gave him most trouble, had been sent by Jefferson Davis to take supreme command in the West, and had collected 11,000 men at Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, 45 miles east of Vicksburg. Grant was able to take his enemy in detail. Having broken up Johnston's force he defeated Pemberton in a series of battles. His victory at Champion's Hill on May 16, not a fortnight after Chancellorsville, conveyed to his mind the assurance that the North would win the war. An assault on Vicksburg failed with heavy loss. Pemberton was at last closely invested in Vicksburg and Grant could establish safe communications with the North by way of the lower Yazoo and up the Mississippi above its mouth. There had been dissension between Pemberton and Johnston, who, seeing that gunboats proved able to pass Vicksburg in any case, thought that Pemberton, whom he could not at the moment hope to relieve, should abandon Vicksburg and try to save his army. Long before Johnston could be sufficiently reinforced to attack Grant, Grant's force had been raised to 71,000. On July 4, 1863, the day of the annual commemoration of national Independence, Vicksburg was surrendered. Its garrison, who had suffered severely, were well victualled by Grant and allowed to go free on parole. Pemberton in his vexation treated Grant with peculiar insolence, which provoked a singular exhibition of the conqueror's good temper to him; and in his despatches to the President, Grant mentioned nothing with greater pride than the absence of a word or a sign on the part of his men which could hurt the feelings of the fallen. Johnston was forced to abandon the town of Jackson with its large stores to Sherman, but could not be pursued in his retreat. On July 9, five days later, the defender of Port Hudson, invested shortly before by Banks, who had not force enough for an assault, heard the news of Vicksburg and surrendered. Lincoln could now boast to the North that "the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea."
At the very hour when Vicksburg was surrendered Lincoln had been issuing the news of another victory won in the preceding three days, which, along with the capture of Vicksburg, marked the turning point of the war. For more than a month after the battle of Chancellorsville the two opposing armies in the East had lain inactive. The Conscription Law, with which we must deal later, had recently been passed, and various elements of discontent and disloyalty in the North showed a great deal of activity. It seems that Jefferson Davis at first saw no political advantage in the military risk of invading the North. Lee thought otherwise, and was eager to follow up his success. At last, early in June, 1863, he started northward. This time he aimed at the great industrial regions of Pennsylvania, hoping also while assailing them to draw Hooker further from Washington. Hooker, on first learning that Lee had crossed the Rappahannock, entertained the thought of himself going south of it and attacking Richmond. Lincoln dissuaded him, since he might be "entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence"; he could not take Richmond for weeks, and his communications might be cut; besides, Lincoln added, his true objective point throughout was Lee's army and not Richmond. Hooker's later movements, in conformity with what he could gather of Lee's movements, were prudent and skilful. He rejected a later suggestion of Lincoln's that he should strike quickly at the most assailable point in Lee's lengthening line of communications, and he was wise, for Lee could live on the country he was traversing, and Hooker now aimed at covering Philadelphia or Baltimore and Washington, according to the direction which Lee might take, watching all the while for the moment to strike. He found himself hampered in some details by probably injudicious orders of his superior, Halleck, and became irritable and querulous; Lincoln had to exercise his simple arts to keep him to his duty and to soothe him, and was for the moment successful. Suddenly on June 27, with a battle in near prospect, Hooker sent in his resignation; probably he meant it, but there was no time to debate the matter. Probably he had lost confidence in himself, as he did before at Chancellorsville. Lincoln evidently judged that his state of mind made it wise to accept this resignation. He promptly appointed in Hooker's place one of his subordinates, General George Meade, a lean, tall, studious, somewhat sharp-tongued man, not brilliant or popular or the choice that the army would have expected, but with a record in previous campaigns which made him seem to Lincoln trustworthy, as he was. A subordinate command in which he could really distinguish himself was later found for Hooker, who now took leave of his army in words of marked generosity towards Meade. All this while there was great excitement in the North. Urgent demands had been raised for the recall of McClellan, a course of which, Lincoln justly observed, no one could measure the inconvenience so well as he.
Lee was now feeling his way, somewhat in the dark as to his enemy's movements, because he had despatched most of his cavalry upon raiding expeditions towards the important industrial centre of Harrisburg. Meade continued on a parallel course to him, with his army spread out to guard against any movements of Lee's to the eastward. Each commander would have preferred to fight the other upon the defensive. Suddenly on July 1, three days after Meade had taken command, a chance collision took place north of the town of Gettysburg between the advance guards of the two armies. It developed into a general engagement, of which the result must partly depend on the speed with which each commander could bring up the remainder of his army. On the first day Lee achieved a decided success. The Northern troops were driven back upon steep heights just south of Gettysburg, of which the contour made it difficult for the enemy to co-ordinate his movements in any attack on them. Here Meade, who when the battle began was ten miles away and did not expect it, was able by the morning of the 2nd or during that day to bring up his full force; and here, contrary to his original choice of a position for bringing on a battle, he made his stand. The attack planned by Lee on the following day must, in his opinion, afterwards have been successful if "Stonewall" Jackson had been alive and with him. As it was, his most brilliant remaining subordinate, Longstreet, disapproved of any assault, and on this and the following day obeyed his orders reluctantly and too slowly. On July 3, 1863, Lee renewed his attack. In previous battles the Northern troops had been contending with invisible enemies in woods; now, after a heavy cannonade, the whole Southern line could be seen advancing in the open to a desperate assault. This attack was crushed by the Northern fire. First and last in the fighting round Gettysburg the North lost 23,000 out of about 93,000 men, and the South about an equal number out of 78,000. The net result was that, after a day's delay, Lee felt compelled to retreat. Nothing but an actual victory would have made it wise for him to persist in his adventurous invasion.
The importance of this, which has been remembered as the chief battle of the war, must be estimated rather by the peril from which the North was delivered than by the results it immediately reaped. Neither on July 3 nor during Lee's subsequent retreat did Meade follow up his advantage with the boldness to which Lincoln, in the midst of his congratulations, exhorted him. On July 12 Lee recrossed the Potomac. Meade on the day before had thought of attacking him, but desisted on the advice of the majority in a council of war. That council of war, as Lincoln said, should never have been held. Its decision was demonstrably wrong, since it rested on the hope that Lee would himself attack. Lincoln writhed at a phrase in Meade's general orders about "driving the invader from our soil." "Will our generals," he exclaimed in private, "never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil." Meade, however, unlike McClellan, was only cautious, not lukewarm, nor without a mind of his own. The army opposed to him was much larger than that which McClellan failed to overwhelm after Antietam. He had offered to resign when he inferred Lincoln's dissatisfaction from a telegram. Lincoln refused this, and made it clear through another officer that his strong opinion as to what might have been done did not imply ingratitude or want of confidence towards "a brave and skilful officer, and a true man." Characteristically he relieved his sense of Meade's omissions in a letter of most lucid criticism, and characteristically he never sent it. Step by step Meade moved on Lee's track into the enemy's country. Indecisive manoeuvres on both sides continued over four months. Lee was forced over the Rappahannock, then over the Rapidan; Meade followed him, found his army in peril, and prudently and promptly withdrew. In December the two armies went into winter quarters on the two sides of the Rappahannock to await the opening of a very different campaign when the next spring was far advanced.
The autumn months of 1863 witnessed in the Middle West a varying conflict ending in a Northern victory hardly less memorable than those of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. At last, after the fall of Vicksburg, Rosecrans in Middle Tennessee found himself ready to advance. By skilful manoeuvres, in the difficult country where the Tennessee River cuts the Cumberland mountains and the parallel ranges which run from north-east to south-west behind, he turned the flank of Bragg's position at Chattanooga and compelled him to evacuate that town in the beginning of September. Bragg, as he retreated, succeeded in getting false reports as to his movements and the condition of his army conveyed to Rosecrans, who accordingly followed him up in an incautious manner. By this time the bulk of the forces that had been used against Vicksburg should have been brought to support Rosecrans. Halleck, however, at first scattered them for purposes which he thought important in the West. After a while, however, one part of the army at Vicksburg was brought back to General Burnside in Ohio, from whom it had been borrowed. Burnside accomplished the very advance by Lexington, in Kentucky, over the mountains into Eastern Tennessee, which Lincoln had so long desired for the relief of the Unionists there, and he was able to hold his ground, defeating at Knoxville a little later an expedition under Longstreet which was sent to dislodge him. Other portions of the Western army were at last ordered to join Rosecrans, but did not reach him before he had met with disaster. For the Confederate authorities, eager to retrieve their losses, sent every available reinforcement to Bragg, and he was shortly able to turn back towards Chattanooga with over 71,000 men against the 57,000 with which Rosecrans, scattering his troops in false security, was pursuing him. The two armies came upon one another, without clear expectation, upon the Chicamauga Creek beyond the ridge which lies south-east of Chattanooga. The battle fought among the woods and hills by Chicamauga on September 19 and 20 surpassed any other in the war in the heaviness of the loss on each side. On the second day Bragg's manoeuvres broke Rosecrans' line, and only an extraordinarily gallant stand by Thomas with a part of the line, in successive positions of retreat, prevented Bragg from turning the hasty retirement of the remainder into a disastrous rout. As it was, Rosecrans made good his retreat to Chattanooga, but there he was in danger of being completely cut off. A corps was promptly detached from Meade in Virginia, placed under Hooker, and sent to relieve him. Rosecrans, who in a situation of real difficulty seems to have had no resourcefulness, was replaced in his command by Thomas. Grant was appointed to supreme command of all the forces in the West and ordered to Chattanooga. There, after many intricate operations on either side, a great battle was eventually fought on November 24 and 25, 1863. Grant had about 60,000 men; Bragg, who had detached Longstreet for his vain attack on Burnside, had only 33,000, but he had one steep and entrenched ridge behind another on which to stand. The fight was marked by notable incidents—Hooker's "battle above the clouds"; and the impulse by which apparently with no word of command, Thomas' corps, tired of waiting while Sherman advanced upon the one flank and Hooker upon the other, arose and carried a ridge which the enemy and Grant himself had regarded as impregnable. It ended in a rout of the Confederates, which was energetically followed up. Bragg's army was broken and driven right back into Georgia. To sum up the events of the year, the one serious invasion of the North by the South had failed, and the dominion on which the Confederacy had any real hold was now restricted to the Atlantic States, Alabama, and a part of the State of Mississippi.
At this point, at which the issue of the war, if it were only pursued, could not be doubted, and at which, as it happens, the need of Lincoln's personal intervention in military matters became greatly diminished, we may try to obtain a general impression of his wisdom, or want of it, in such affairs. The closeness and keen intelligence with which he followed the war is undoubted, but could only be demonstrated by a lengthy accumulation of evidence. The larger strategy of the North, sound in the main, was of course the product of more than one co-operating mind, but as his was undoubtedly the dominant will of his Administration, so too it seems likely that, with his early and sustained grasp of the general problem, he contributed not a little to the clearness and consistency of the strategical plans. The amount of the forces raised was for long, as we shall see later, beyond his control, and, in the distribution of what he had to the best effect, his own want of knowledge and the poor judgment of his earlier advisers seem to have caused some errors. He started with the evident desire to put himself almost unreservedly in the hands of the competent military counsellors, and he was able in the end to do so; but for a long intermediate period, as we have seen, he was compelled as a responsible statesman to forego this wish. It was all that time his function first to pick out, with very little to go by, the best officers he could find, replacing them with better when he could; and secondly to give them just so much direction, and no more, as his wisdom at a distance and their more expert skill upon the spot made proper. In each of these respects his occasional mistakes are plain enough, but the evidence, upon which he has often been thought capable of setting aside sound military considerations causelessly or in obedience to interested pressure, breaks down when the facts of any imputed instance are known. It is manifest that he gained rapidly both in knowledge of the men he dealt with and in the firm kindness with which he treated them. It is remarkable that, with his ever-burning desire to see vigour and ability displayed, he could watch so constantly as he did for the precise opportunity or the urgent necessity before he made changes in command. It is equally remarkable that, with his decided and often right views as to what should be done, his advice was always offered with equal deference and plainness. "Quite possibly I was wrong both then and now," he once wrote to Hooker, "but in the great responsibility resting upon me, I cannot be entirely silent. Now, all I ask is that you will be in such mood that we can get into action the best cordial judgment of yourself and General Halleck, with my poor mite added, if indeed he and you shall think it entitled to any consideration at all." The man whose habitual attitude was this, and who yet could upon the instant take his own decision, may be presumed to have been wise in many cases where we do not know his reasons. Few statesmen, perhaps, have so often stood waiting and refrained themselves from a firm will and not from the want of it, and for the sake of the rare moment of action.
The passing of the crisis in the war was fittingly commemorated by a number of State Governors who combined to institute a National Cemetery upon the field of Gettysburg. It was dedicated on November 19, 1863. The speech of the occasion was delivered by Edward Everett, the accomplished man once already mentioned as the orator of highest repute in his day. The President was bidden then to say a few words at the close. The oration with which for two hours Everett delighted his vast audience charms no longer, though it is full of graceful sentiment and contains a very reasonable survey of the rights and wrongs involved in the war, and of its progress till then. The few words of Abraham Lincoln were such as perhaps sank deep, but left his audience unaware that a classic had been spoken which would endure with the English language. The most literary man present was also Lincoln's greatest admirer, young John Hay. To him it seemed that Mr. Everett spoke perfectly, and "the old man" gracefully for him. These were the few words: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or to detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
2.Conscription and the Politics of 1863.
The events of our day may tempt us to underestimate the magnitude of the American Civil War, not only in respect of its issues, but in respect of the efforts that were put forth. Impartial historians declare that "no previous war had ever in the same time entailed upon the combatants such enormous sacrifices of life and wealth." Even such battles as Malplaquet had not rivalled in carnage the battles of this war, and in the space of these four years there took place a number of engagements—far more than can be recounted here—in many of which, as at Gettysburg, the casualties amounted to a quarter of the whole forces engaged. The Southern armies, especially towards the end of the war, were continually being pitted against vastly superior numbers; the Northern armies, whether we look at the whole war as one vast enterprise of conquest or at almost any important battle save that of Gettysburg, were as continually confronted with great obstacles in the matter of locality and position. In this case, of a new and not much organised country unprepared for war, exact or intelligible figures as to losses or as to the forces raised must not be expected, but, according to what seems to be a fair estimate, the total deaths on the Northern and the Southern side directly due to the war stood to the population of the whole country at its beginning as at least 1 to 32. Of these deaths about half occurred on the Northern and half on the Southern side; this, however, implies that in proportion to its population the South lost twice as heavily as the North.
Neither side obtained the levies of men that it needed without resort to compulsion. The South, in which this necessity either arose more quickly or was seen more readily, had called up before the end of the war its whole available manhood. In the North the proportion of effort and sacrifice required was obviously less, and, at least at one critical moment, it was disastrously under-estimated. A system of compulsion, to be used in default of volunteering, was brought into effect half-way through the war. Under this system there were in arms at the end of the war 980,000 white Northern soldiers, who probably stood to the population at that time in as high a proportion as 1 to 25, and everything was in readiness for calling up a vastly greater number if necessary. After twenty months of war, when the purely voluntary system still existed but was proving itself inadequate to make good the wastage of the armies, the number in arms for the North was 860,717, perhaps as much as 1 in 27 of the population then. It would be useless to evade the question which at once suggests itself, whether the results of voluntary enlistment in this country during the present war have surpassed to the extent to which they undoubtedly ought to have surpassed the standard set by the North in the Civil War. For these two cases furnish the only instances in which the institution of voluntary enlistment has been submitted to a severe test by Governments reluctant to abandon it. The two cases are of course not strictly comparable. Our own country in this matter had the advantages of riper organisation, political and social, and of the preparatory education given it by the Territorials and by Lord Roberts. The extremity of the need was in our case immediately apparent; and the cause at issue appealed with the utmost simplicity and intensity to every brave and to every gentle nature. In the Northern States, on the other hand, apart from all other considerations, there were certain to be sections, local, racial, and political, upon which the national cause could take no very firm hold. That this was so proves no unusual prevalence of selfishness or of stupidity; and the apathy of such sections of the people, like that of smaller sections in our own case, sets in a brighter light the devotion which made so many eager to give their all. Moreover, the general patriotism of the Northern people is not to be judged by the failure of the purely voluntary system, but rather, as will be seen later, by the success of the system which succeeded it. There is in our case no official statement of the exact number serving on any particular day, but the facts which are published make it safe to conclude that, at the end of fifteen months of war, when no compulsion was in force, the soldiers then in service and drawn from the United Kingdom alone amounted to 1 in 17 of the population. The population in this case is one of which a smaller proportion are of military age than was the case in the Northern States, with their great number of immigrants. The apparent effect of these figures would be a good deal heightened if it were possible to make a correct addition in the case of each country for the numbers killed or disabled in war up to the dates in question and for the numbers serving afloat. Moreover, the North, when it was driven to abandon the purely voluntary system, had not reached the point at which the withdrawal of men from civil occupations could have been regarded among the people as itself a national danger, or at which the Government was compelled to deter some classes from enlisting; new industries unconnected with the war were all the while springing up, and the production and export of foodstuffs were increasing rapidly. For the reasons which have been stated, there is nothing invidious in thus answering an unavoidable question. Judged by any previous standard of voluntary national effort, the North answered the test well. Each of our related peoples must look upon the rally of its fathers and grandfathers in the one case, its brothers and sons in the other, with mingled feelings in which pride predominates, the most legitimate source of pride in our case being the unity of the Empire. To each the question must present itself whether the nations, democratic and otherwise, which have followed from the first, or, like the South, have rapidly adopted a different principle, have not, in this respect, a juster cause of pride. In some of these countries, by common and almost unquestioning consent, generation after generation of youths and men in their prime have held themselves at the instant disposal of their country if need should arise; and, in the absence of need and the absence of excitement, have contentedly borne the appreciable sacrifice of training. With this it is surely necessary to join a further question, whether the compulsion which, under conscription, the public imposes on individuals is comparable in its harshness to the sacrifice and the conflict of duties imposed by the voluntary system upon the best people in all classes as such.
From the manner in which the war arose it will easily be understood that the South was quicker than the North in shaping its policy for raising armies. Before a shot had been fired at Fort Sumter, and when only seven of the ten Southern States had yet seceded, President Jefferson Davis had at his command more than double the number of the United States Army as it then was. He had already lawful authority to raise that number to nearly three times as many. And, though there was protest in some States, and some friction between the Confederate War Department and the State militias, on the whole the seceding States, in theory jealous of their rights, submitted very readily in questions of defence to the Confederacy.
It is not clear how far the Southern people displayed their warlike temper by a sustained flow of voluntary enlistment; but their Congress showed the utmost promptitude in granting every necessary power to their President, and on April 16, 1862, a sweeping measure of compulsory service was passed. The President of the Confederacy could call into the service any white resident in the South between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, with certain statutory exemptions. There was, of course, trouble about the difficult question of exemptions, and under conflicting pressure the Confederate Congress made and unmade various laws about them. After a time all statutory exemptions were done away, and it was left entirely in the discretion of the Southern President to say what men were required in various departments of civil life. The liability to serve was extended in September, 1862, to all between eighteen and forty-five, and finally in February, 1864, to all between seventeen and fifty. The rigorous conscription which necessity required could not be worked without much complaint. There was a party disposed to regard the law as unconstitutional. The existence of sovereign States within the Confederacy was very likely an obstacle to the local and largely voluntary organisation for deciding claims which can exist in a unified country. A Government so hard driven must, even if liberally minded, have enforced the law with much actual hardship. A belief in the ruthlessness of the Southern conscription penetrated to the North. If was probably exaggerated from the temptation to suppose that secession was the work of a tyranny and not of the Southern people. Desertion and failure of the Conscription Law became common in the course of 1864, but this would seem to have been due not so much to resentment at the system as to the actual loss of a large part of the South, and the spread of a perception that the war was now hopelessly lost. In the last extremities of the Confederate Government the power of compulsion of course completely broke down. But, upon the surface at least, it seems plain that what has been called the military despotism of Jefferson Davis rested upon the determination rather than upon the submissiveness of the people.
In the North, where there was double the population to draw upon, the need for compulsion was not likely to be felt as soon. The various influences which would later depress enlistment had hardly begun to assert themselves, when the Government, as if to aggravate them in advance, committed a blunder which has never been surpassed in its own line. On April 3, 1862, recruiting was stopped dead; the central recruiting office at Washington was closed and its staff dispersed. Many writers agree in charging this error against Stanton. He must have been the prime author of it, but this does not exonerate Lincoln. It was no departmental matter, but a matter of supreme policy. Lincoln's knowledge of human nature and his appreciation of the larger bearings of every question might have been expected to set Stanton right, unless, indeed, the thing was done suddenly behind his back. In any case, this must be added to the indications seen in an earlier chapter, that Lincoln's calm strength and sure judgment had at that time not yet reached their full development. As for Stanton, a man of much narrower mind, but acute, devoted, and morally fearless, kept in the War Department as a sort of tame tiger to prey on abuses, negligences, pretensions, and political influences, this was one among a hundred smaller erratic doings, which his critics have never thought of as outweighing his peculiar usefulness. His departmental point of view can easily be understood. Recruits, embarrassingly, presented themselves much faster than they could be organised or equipped, and an overdriven office did not pause to think out some scheme of enlistment for deferred service. Waste had been terrific, and Stanton did not dislike a petty economy which might shock people in Washington. McClellan clamoured for more men—let him do something with what he had got; Stanton, indeed, very readily became sanguine that McClellan, once in motion, would crush the Confederacy. Events conspired to make the mistake disastrous. In these very days the Confederacy was about to pass its own Conscription Act. McClellan, instead of pressing on to Richmond, sat down before Yorktown and let the Confederate conscripts come up. Halleck was crawling southward, when a rapid advance might have robbed the South of a large recruiting area. The reopening of enlistment came on the top of the huge disappointment at McClellan's failure in the peninsula. There was a creditable response to the call which was then made for volunteers. But the disappointment of the war continued throughout 1862; the second Bull Run; the inconclusive sequel to Antietam; Fredericksburg; and, side by side with these events, the long-drawn failure of Buell's and Rosecrans' operations. The spirit of voluntary service seems to have revived vigorously enough wherever and whenever the danger of Southern invasion became pressing, but under this protracted depressing influence it no longer rose to the task of subduing the South. It must be added that wages in civil employment were very high. Lincoln, it is evident, felt this apparent failure of patriotism sadly, but in calm retrospect it cannot seem surprising.
In the latter part of 1862 attempts were made to use the powers of compulsion which the several States possessed, under the antiquated laws as to militia which existed in all of them, in order to supplement recruiting. The number of men raised for short periods in this way is so small that the description of the Northern armies at this time as purely volunteer armies hardly needs qualification. It would probably be worth no one's while to investigate the makeshift system with which the Government, very properly, then tried to help itself out; for it speedily and completely failed. The Conscription Act, which became law on March 3, 1863, set up for the first time an organisation for recruiting which covered the whole country but was under the complete control of the Federal Government. It was placed under an officer of great ability, General J. B. Fry, formerly chief of staff to Buell, and now entitled Provost-Marshal-General. It was his business, through provost-marshals in a number of districts, each divisible into sub-districts as convenience might require, to enroll all male citizens between twenty and forty-five. He was to assign a quota, in other words a stated proportion of the number of troops for which the Government might at any time call, to each district, having regard to the number of previous enlistments from each district. The management of voluntary enlistment was placed in his hands, in order that the two methods of recruiting might be worked in harmony. The system as a whole was quite distinct from any such system of universal service as might have been set up beforehand in time of peace. Compulsion only came into force in default of sufficient volunteers from any district to provide its required number of the troops wanted. When it came into force the "drafts" of conscripts were chosen by lot from among those enrolled as liable for service. But there was a way of escape from actual service. It seems, from what Lincoln wrote, to have been looked upon as a time-honoured principle, established by precedent in all countries, that the man on whom the lot fell might provide a substitute if he could. The market price of a substitute (a commodity for the provision of which a class of "substitute brokers" came into being) proved to be about 1,000 dollars. Business or professional men, who felt they could not be spared from home but wished to act patriotically, did buy substitutes; but they need not have done so, for the law contained a provision intended, as Lincoln recorded, to safeguard poorer men against such a rise in prices. They could escape by paying 300 dollars, or 60 pounds, not, in the then state of wages, an extravagant penalty upon an able-bodied man. The sums paid under this provision covered the cost of the recruiting business.
Most emphatically the Conscription Law operated mainly as a stimulus to voluntary enlistment. The volunteer received, as the conscript did not, a bounty from the Government; States, counties, and smaller localities, when once a quota was assigned to them, vied with one another in filling their quota with volunteers, and for that purpose added to the Government bounty. It goes without saying that in a new country, with its scattered country population and its disorganised great new towns, there were plenty of abuses. Substitute brokers provided the wrong article; ingenious rascals invented the trade of "bounty-jumping," and would enlist for a bounty, desert, enlist for another bounty, and so on indefinitely; and the number of men enrolled who were afterwards unaccounted for was large. There was of course also grumbling of localities at the quotas assigned to them, though no pains were spared to assign them fairly. There was some opposition to the working of the law after it was passed, but it was, not general, but partly the opposition of rowdies in degraded neighbourhoods, partly factitious political opposition, and partly seditious and openly friendly to the South. In general the country accepted the law as a manifest military necessity. The spirit and manner of its acceptance may be judged from the results of any of the calls for troops under this law. For example, in December, 1864, towards the end of the war, 211,752 men were brought up to the colours; of these it seems that 194,715 were ordinary volunteers, 10,192 were substitutes provided by conscripts, and only 6,845 were actually compelled men. It is perhaps more significant still that among those who did not serve there were only 460 who paid the 300-dollar penalty, as against the 10,192 who must have paid at least three times that sum for substitutes. Behind the men who had been called up by the end of the war the North had, enrolled and ready to be called, over two million men. The North had not to suffer as the South suffered, but unquestionably in this matter it rose to the occasion.
The constitutional validity of the law was much questioned by politicians, but never finally tried out on appeal to the Supreme Court. There seems to be no room for doubt that Lincoln's own reasoning on this matter was sound. The Constitution simply gave to Congress "power to raise and support armies," without a word as to the particular means to be used for the purpose; the new and extremely well-considered Constitution of the Confederacy was in this respect the same. The Constitution, argued Lincoln, would not have given the power of raising armies without one word as to the mode in which it was to be exercised, if it had not meant Congress to be the sole judge as to the mode. "The principle," he wrote, "of the draft, which simply is involuntary or enforced service, is not new. It has been practised in all ages of the world. It was well known to the framers of our Constitution as one of the modes of raising armies. . . . It had been used just before, in establishing our independence, and it was also used under the Constitution in 1812." In fact, as we have seen, a certain power of compelling military service existed in each of the States and had existed in them from the first. Their ancestors had brought the principle with them from the old country, in which the system of the "militia ballot" had not fallen into desuetude when they became independent. The traditional English jealousy, which the American Colonies had imbibed, against the military power of the Crown had never manifested itself in any objection to the means which might be taken to raise soldiers, but in establishing a strict control of the number which the Crown could at any moment maintain; and this control had long been in England and had always been in America completely effective. We may therefore treat the protest which was raised against the law as unconstitutional, and the companion argument that it tended towards military despotism, as having belonged to the realm of political verbiage, and as neither founded in reason nor addressed to living popular emotions.
This is the way in which the Northern people, of whom a large part were, it must be remembered, Democrats, seem to have regarded these contentions, and a real sense, apart from these contentions, that conscription was unnecessary or produced avoidable hardship seems scarcely to have existed. It was probably for this reason that Lincoln never published the address to the people, or perhaps more particularly to the Democratic opposition, to which several references have already been made. In the course of it he said: "At the beginning of the war, and ever since, a variety of motives, pressing, some in one direction and some in the other, would be presented to the mind of each man physically fit to be a soldier, upon the combined effect of which motives he would, or would not, voluntarily enter the service. Among these motives would be patriotism, political bias, ambition, personal courage, love of adventure, want of employment, and convenience, or the opposite of some of these. We already have and have had in the service, as it appears, substantially all that can be obtained upon this voluntary weighing of motives. And yet we must somehow obtain more or relinquish the original object of the contest, together with all the blood and treasure already expended in the effort to secure it. To meet this necessity the law for the draft has been enacted. You who do not wish to be soldiers do not like this law. This is natural; nor does it imply want of patriotism. Nothing can be so just and necessary as to make us like it if it is disagreeable to us. We are prone, too, to find false arguments with which to excuse ourselves for opposing such disagreeable things." He proceeded to meet some of these arguments upon the lines which have already been indicated. After speaking of the precedents for conscription in America, he continued: "Wherein is the peculiar hardship now? Shall we shrink from the necessary means to maintain our free government, which our grandfathers employed to establish it and our fathers have already once employed to maintain it? Are we degenerate? Has the manhood of our race run out?" Unfair administration was apprehended. "This law," he said, "belongs to a class, which class is composed of those laws whose object is to distribute burthens or benefits on the principle of equality. No one of these laws can ever be practically administered with that exactness which can be conceived of in the mind. A tax law . . . will be a dead letter if no one will be compelled to pay until it can be shown that every other one will be compelled to pay in precisely the same proportion according to value; nay, even it will be a dead letter if no one can be compelled to pay until it is certain that every other one will pay at all. . . . This sort of difficulty applies in full force to the practical administration of the draft law. In fact, the difficulty is greater in the case of the draft law"; and he proceeded to state the difficulties. "In all these points," he continued, "errors will occur in spite of the utmost fidelity. The Government is bound to administer the law with such an approach to exactness as is usual in analogous cases, and as entire good faith and fidelity will reach." Errors, capable of correction, should, he promised, be corrected when pointed out; but he concluded: "With these views and on these principles, I feel bound to tell you it is my purpose to see the draft law faithfully executed." It was his way, as has been seen, sometimes to set his thoughts very plainly on paper and to consider afterwards the wisdom of publishing them. This paper never saw the light till after his death. It is said that some scruple as to the custom in his office restrained him from sending it out, but this scruple probably weighed with him the more because he saw that the sincere people whom he had thought of addressing needed no such appeal. It was surely a wise man who, writing so wisely, could see the greater wisdom of silence.
The opposition to the Conscription Law may be treated simply as one element in the propaganda of the official Opposition to the Administration. The opposition to such a measure which we might possibly have expected to arise from churches, or from schools of thought independent of the ordinary parties, does not seem, as a matter of fact, to have arisen. The Democratic party had, as we have seen, revived in force in the latter part of 1862. Persons, ambitious, from whatever mixture of motives, of figuring as leaders of opposition during a war which they did not condemn, found a public to which to appeal, mainly because the war was not going well. They found a principle of opposition satisfactory to themselves in condemning the Proclamation of Emancipation. (It was significant that McClellan shortly after the Proclamation issued a General Order enjoining obedience to the Government and adding the hint that "the remedy for political errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls.") In the curious creed which respectable men, with whom allegiance to an ancient party could be a powerful motive at such a time, were driven to construct for themselves, enforcement of the duty to defend the country and liberation of the enemy's slaves appeared as twin offences against the sacred principles of constitutional freedom. It would have been monstrous to say that most of the Democrats were opposed to the war. Though a considerable number had always disliked it and now found courage to speak loudly, the bulk were as loyal to the Union as those very strong Republicans like Greeley, who later on despaired of maintaining it. But there were naturally Democrats for whom a chance now appeared in politics, and who possessed that common type of political mind that meditates deeply on minor issues and is inflamed by zeal against minor evils. Such men began to debate with their consciences whether the wicked Government might not become more odious than the enemy. There arose, too, as there often arises in war time, a fraternal feeling between men who hated the war and men who reflected how much better they could have if waged it themselves.
There was, of course, much in the conduct of the Government which called for criticism, and on that account it was a grievous pity that independence should have stultified itself by reviving in any form the root principle of party government, and recognising as the best critics of the Administration men who desired to take its place. More useful censure of the Government at that time might have come from men who, if they had axes to grind, would have publicly thrown them away. There were two points which especially called for criticism, apart from military administration, upon which, as it happened, Lincoln knew more than his critics knew and more than he could say. One of these points was extravagance and corruption in the matter of army contracts and the like; these evils were dangerously prevalent, but members of the Cabinet were as anxious to prevent them as any outside critic could be, and it was friendly help, not censure, that was required. The other point was the exercise of martial law, a difficult question, upon which a word must here be said, but upon which only those could usefully have spoken out whose general support of the Government was pronounced and sincere.
In almost every rebellion or civil war statesmen and the military officers under them are confronted with the need, for the sake of the public safety or even of ordinary justice, of rules and procedure which the law in peace time would abhor. In great conflicts, such as our own wars after the French Revolution and the American Civil War, statesmen such as Pitt and Lincoln, capable of handling such a problem well, have had their hands full of yet more urgent matters. The puzzling part of the problem does not lie in the neighbourhood of the actual fighting, where for the moment there can be no law but the will of the commander, but in the districts more distantly affected, or in the period when the war is smouldering out. Lincoln's Government had at first to guard itself against dangerous plots which could be scented but not proved in Washington; later on it had to answer such questions as this: What should be done when a suspected agent of the enemy is vaguely seen to be working against enlistment, when an attack by the civil mob upon the recruits is likely to result, and when the local magistrate and police are not much to be trusted? There is no doubt that Seward at the beginning, and Stanton persistently, and zealous local commanders now and then solved such problems in a very hasty fashion, or that Lincoln throughout was far more anxious to stand by vigorous agents of the Government than to correct them.
Lincoln claimed that as Commander-in-Chief he had during the continuance of civil war a lawful authority over the lives and liberties of all citizens, whether loyal or otherwise, such as any military commander exercises in hostile country occupied by his troops. He held that there was no proper legal remedy for persons injured under this authority except by impeachment of himself. He held, further, that this authority extended to every place to which the action of the enemy in any form extended—that is, to the whole country. This he took to be the doctrine of English Common Law, and he contended that the Constitution left this doctrine in full force. Whatever may be said as to his view of the Common Law doctrine, his construction of the Constitution would now be held by every one to have been wrong. Plainly read, the Constitution swept away the whole of that somewhat undefined doctrine of martial law which may be found in some decisions of our Courts, and it did much more. Every Legislature in the British Empire can, subject to the veto of the Crown, enact whatever exceptional measures of public safety it thinks necessary in an emergency. The Constitution restricted this legislative power within the very narrowest limits. There is, moreover, a recognised British practice, initiated by Wellington and Castlereagh, by which all question as to the authority of martial law is avoided; a governor or commander during great public peril is encouraged to consider what is right and necessary, not what is lawful, knowing that if necessary there will be enquiry into his conduct afterwards, but knowing also that, unless he acts quite unconscionably, he and his agents will be protected by an Act of Indemnity from the legal consequences of whatever they have done in good faith. The American Constitution would seem to render any such Act of Indemnity impossible. In a strictly legal sense, therefore, the power which Lincoln exercised must be said to have been usurped. The arguments by which he defended his own legality read now as good arguments on what the law should have been, but bad arguments on what the law was. He did not, perhaps, attach extreme importance to this legal contention, for he declared plainly that he was ready to break the law in minor matters rather than let the whole fabric of law go to ruin. This, however, does not prove that he was insincere when he pleaded legal as well as moral justification; he probably regarded the Constitution in a manner which modern lawyers find it difficult to realise; he probably applied in construing it a principle such as Hamilton laid down for the construction of statutes, that it was "qualified and controlled" by the Common Law and by considerations of "convenience" and of "reason" and of the policy which its framers, as wise and honest men, would have followed in present circumstances; he probably would have adapted to the occasion Hamilton's position that "construction may be made against the letter of the statute to render it agreeable to natural justice."
In the exercise of his supposed prerogative Lincoln sanctioned from beginning to end of the war the arrest of many suspected dangerous persons under what may be called "letters de cachet" from Seward and afterwards from Stanton. He publicly professed in 1863 his regret that he had not caused this to be done in cases, such as those of Lee and Joseph Johnston, where it had not been done. When agitation arose on the matter in the end of 1862 many political prisoners were, no doubt wisely, released. Congress then proceeded, in 1863, to exercise such powers in the matter as the Constitution gave it by an Act suspending, where the President thought fit, the privilege of the writ ofhabeas corpus. A decision of the Supreme Court, delivered curiously enough by Lincoln's old friend David Davis, showed that the real effect of this Act, so far as valid under the Constitution, was ridiculously small (seeEx parte Milligan, 4 Russell, 2). In any case the Act was hedged about with many precautions. These were entirely disregarded by the Government, which proceeded avowedly upon Lincoln's theory of martial law. The whole country was eventually proclaimed to be under martial law, and many persons were at the orders of the local military commander tried and punished by court-martial for offences, such as the discouragement of enlistment or the encouragement of desertion, which might not have been punishable by the ordinary law, or of which the ordinary Courts might not have convicted them. This fresh outbreak of martial law must in large part be ascribed to Lincoln's determination that the Conscription Act should not be frustrated; but apart from offences relating to enlistment there was from 1863 onwards no lack of seditious plots fomented by the agents of the Confederacy in Canada, and there were several secret societies, "knights" of this, that, or the other. Lincoln, it is true, scoffed at these, but very often the general on the spot thought seriously of them, and the extreme Democratic leader, Vallandigham, boasted that there were half a million men in the North enrolled in such seditious organisations. Drastic as the Government proceedings were, the opposition to them died down before the popular conviction that strong measures were necessary, and the popular appreciation that the blood-thirsty despot "King Abraham I.," as some Democrats were pleased to call him, was not of the stuff of which despots were made and was among the least blood-thirsty men living. The civil Courts made no attempt to interfere; they said that, whatever the law, they could not in fact resist generals commanding armies. British Courts would in many cases have declined to interfere, not on the ground that the general had the might, but on the ground that he had the right; yet, it seems, they would not quite have relinquished their hold on the matter, but would have held themselves free to consider whether the district in which martial law was exercised was materially affected by the state of war or not. The legal controversy ended in a manner hardly edifying to the layman; in the course of 1865 the Supreme Court solemnly tried out the question of the right of one Milligan to a writ ofhabeas corpus. At that time the war, the only ground on which the right could have been refused him, had for some months been ended; and nobody in court knew or cared whether Milligan was then living to enjoy his right or had been shot long before.
Save in a few cases of special public interest, Lincoln took no personal part in the actual administration of these coercive measures. So great a tax was put upon his time, and indeed his strength, by the personal consideration of cases of discipline in the army, that he could not possibly have undertaken a further labour of the sort. Moreover, he thought it more necessary for the public good to give steady support to his ministers and generals than to check their action in detail. He contended that no great injustice was likely to arise. Very likely he was wrong; not only Democrats, but men like Senator John Sherman, a strong and sensible Republican, thought him wrong. There are evil stories about the secret police under Stanton, and some records of the proceedings of the courts-martial, composed sometimes of the officers least useful at the front, are not creditable. Very likely, as John Sherman thought, the ordinary law would have met the needs of the case in many districts. The mere number of the political prisoners, who counted by thousands, proves nothing, for the least consideration of the circumstances will show that the active supporters of the Confederacy in the North must have been very numerous. Nor does it matter much that, to the horror of some people, there were persons of station, culture, and respectability among the sufferers; persons of this kind were not likely to be exposed to charges of disloyal conduct if they were actively loyal. Obscure and ignorant men are much more likely to have become the innocent victims of spiteful accusers or vile agents of police. Doubtless this might happen; but that does not of itself condemn Lincoln for having maintained an extreme form of martial law. The particular kind of oppression that is likely to have occurred is one against which the normal procedure of justice and police in America is said to-day to provide no sufficient safeguard. It is almost certain that the regular course of law would have exposed the public weal to formidable dangers; but it by no means follows that it would have saved individuals from wrong. The risk that many individuals would be grievously wronged was at least not very great. The Government was not pursuing men for erroneous opinions, but for certain very definite kinds of action dangerous to the State. These were indeed kinds of action with which Lincoln thought ordinary Courts of justice "utterly incompetent" to deal, and he avowed that he aimed rather at preventing intended actions than at punishing them when done. To some minds this will seem to be an attitude dangerous to liberty, but he was surely justified when he said, "In such cases the purposes of men are much more easily understood than in cases of ordinary crime. The man who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his Government is discussed cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered, he is sure to help the enemy, much more if he talks ambiguously—talks for his country with 'buts' and 'ifs' and 'ands.'" In any case, Lincoln stood clearly and boldly for repressing speech or act, that could help the enemy, with extreme vigour and total disregard for the legalities of peace time. A little later on we shall see fully whether this imported on his part any touch whatever of the ferocity which it may seem to suggest.
The Democratic opposition which made some headway in the first half of 1863 comprised a more extreme opposition prevailing in the West and led by Clement Vallandigham, a Congressman from Ohio, and a milder opposition led by Horatio Seymour, who from the end of 1862 to the end of 1864, when he failed of re-election, was Governor of New York State. The extreme section were often called "Copperheads," after a venomous snake of that name. Strictly, perhaps, this political term should be limited to the few who went so far as to desire the victory of the South; more loosely it was applied to a far larger number who went no further than to say that the war should be stopped. This demand, it must be observed, was based upon the change of policy shown in the Proclamation of Emancipation. "The war for the Union," said Vallandigham in Congress in January, 1863, "is in your hands a most bloody and costly failure. War for the Union was abandoned; war for the negro openly begun. With what success? Let the dead at Fredericksburg answer.—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.—Stop fighting. Make an armistice. Accept at once friendly foreign mediation." And further: "The secret but real purpose of the war was to abolish slavery in the States, and with it the change of our present democratical form of government into an imperial despotism." This was in no sense treason; it was merely humbug. The alleged design to establish despotism, chiefly revealed at that moment by the liberation of slaves, had of course no existence. Equally false, as will be seen later, was the whole suggestion that any peace could have been had with the South except on the terms of separation. Vallandigham, a demagogue of real vigour, had perhaps so much honesty as is compatible with self-deception; at any rate, upon his subsequent visit to the South his intercourse with Southern leaders was conducted on the footing that the Union should be restored. But his character inspired no respect. Burnside, now commanding the troops in Ohio, held that violent denunciation of the Government in a tone that tended to demoralise the troops was treason, since it certainly was not patriotism, and when in May, 1863, Vallandigham made a very violent and offensive speech in Ohio he had him arrested in his house at night, and sent him before a court-martial which imprisoned him. Loud protest was raised by every Democrat. This worry came upon Lincoln just after Chancellorsville. He regretted Burnside's action—later on he had to reverse the rash suppression of a newspaper by which Burnside provoked violent indignation—but on this occasion he would only say in public that he "regretted the necessity" of such action. Evidently he thought it his duty to support a well-intentioned general against a dangerous agitator. The course which after some consideration he took was of the nature of a practical joke, perhaps justified by its success. Vallandigham was indeed released; he was taken to the front and handed over to the Confederates as if he had been an exchanged prisoner of war. In reply to demands from the Democratic organisation in Ohio that Vallandigham might be allowed to return home, Lincoln offered to consent if their leaders would sign a pledge to support the war and promote the efficiency of the army. This they called an evasion. Vallandigham made his way to Canada and conducted intrigues from thence. In his absence he was put up for the governorship of Ohio in November, but defeated by a huge majority, doubtless the larger because of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The next year he suddenly returned home, braving the chance of arrest, and, probably to his disappointment, Lincoln let him be. In reply to protests against Vallandigham's arrest which had been sent by meetings in Ohio and New York, Lincoln had written clear defences of his action, from which the foregoing account of his views on martial law has been taken. In one of them was a sentence which probably went further with the people of the North than any other: "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?" There may or may not be some fallacy lurking here, but it must not be supposed that this sentence came from a pleader's ingenuity. It was the expression of a man really agonised by his weekly task of confirming sentences on deserters from the army.