Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

does point to another area of political difficulty Lincoln encountered, and that was the ever-increasing opposition of the Northern Democrats to the war. From the beginning of the secession crisis, pro-Union Northern Democrats had strained to support the Union cause and distance themselves from their Southern counterparts, whom they denounced as the source of so much of the secession trouble. Stephen Douglas, who wore himself into an early grave in June 1861, stumping against secession, declared, “There are but two parties, the party of patriots and the party of traitors. [Democrats] belong to the first.”

It was not a party question, nor a question involving partisan policy; it was a question of government or no government; country or no country; and hence it became the imperative duty of every Union man, every friend of constitutional liberty, to rally to the support of our common country, its government and flag as the only means of checking the progress of revolution and of preserving the Union of States.70

Lincoln, recognizing that the Democrats had garnered a healthy 44 percent of the vote in a three-way race in 1860, struggled to appease them with political and military appointments. But the spirit of Democratic-Republican bipartisanship lasted only a short while. The Northern Democrats’ view of the war was summed up in their slogan “The Constitution as it is; the Union as it was”—and, some of them were inclined to add, “the Negroes where they are.” As the Republican-dominated Congress began to issue unsecured greenbacks, raise tariffs, and gradually move toward emancipation and abolition—to enact, in other words, the Whig domestic agenda—Democratic support began to crumble. “The enormity of this bill,” wailed the Cincinnati Enquirer after the passage of the National Banking Act in 1863, “is sufficient to make General Jackson, who killed the old Bank of the United States, turn over in his coffin. … The design is to destroy the fixed institutions of the States, and to build up a central moneyed despotism.” Protective tariffs were “a great fiscal tyranny,” managed on the backs of midwestern farmers by “the iron-masters of Pennsylvania and the cotton millionaires of New England.” It was as though Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson had once more arisen to do political combat.71

The Democratic Party’s fragments fell into two basic piles. The first, known as the “War Democrats,” had no real organized leadership after the premature death of Stephen Douglas, but War Democrats such as Edwin Stanton of Pennsylvania, Joseph Holt of Kentucky, Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee were as forward as any Republican in their support for the war. However, many of them carefully defined the war they were supporting as a war to reunite the nation and suppress treason, not a war against slavery to result in racial equality. Robert C. Winthrop, a Massachusetts independent who ended up siding with the Democrats during the war, protested that

I, for one, have never had a particle of faith that a sudden sweeping, forcible emancipation could result in anything but mischief and misery for the black race, as well as the white. … The idea that the war is not to be permitted to cease until the whole social structure of the South has been reorganized, is one abhorrent to every instinct of my soul, to every dictate of my judgment, to every principle which I cherish as a statesman or as a Christian. It is a policy, too, in my opinion, utterly unconstitutional; and as much in the spirit of rebellion as almost anything which has been attempted by the Southern States. … We are not for propagating philanthropy at the point of the bayonet. We are not wading through seas of blood in order to reorganize the whole social structure of the South.72

It became increasingly difficult for many War Democrats to keep that line up: Stanton and Butler both moved over to the Republicans at a very early stage of the war and became ardent supporters of emancipation; Joseph Holt served as Lincoln’s judge advocate general. Increasingly, political momentum in the party passed to the “Peace Democrats.” Rallying around prominent Democrats such as Samuel Tilden, Horatio Seymour, and Fernando Wood of New York, Samuel S. Cox, Alexander Long, and George H. Pendleton of Ohio, George Woodward of Pennsylvania, and James Bayard and Willard Saulsbury of Delaware, the Peace Democrats reversed the War Democrats’ order of priorities: end Lincoln’s war before it destroyed the country, even if it meant conceding Southern independence.73

The Republicans looked on the agitation of the Peace Democrats as just more evidence of the same dangerous Democratic policies that had brought on the war in the first place, and so it was not long before partisanship yielded to howling accusations of treason. “These men make the conditions of peace the humiliation of the North,” protested the Philadelphia Press. “If they will not serve the country, they should not become the enemies of those in the country’s service.” At first it was only a matter of name-calling: in the fall of 1861, Ohio Republicans began comparing leading Peace Democrats to copperhead rattlesnakes, and “Copperhead” became the standard Republican way of talking about Democrats. Few of these opposition Democrats were really cut from the same cloth: even Peace Democrats were divided between peace-at-any-price extremists and moderates who wanted to end the war but not at the price of outright disloyalty. Little in these distinctions got much attention in the fevered atmosphere of the war, however. As Confederate agents attempted to manipulate Democratic dissent into outright resistance, army generals began removing Democratic judges from their benches, Democratic preachers from their pulpits, and Democratic newspapers from the mail. Estimates of the actual number of arrests by military authorities vary, from only about 4,400 all the way up to 35,000. But each one of these was treated as an insufferable violation of civil liberties, and each one only heightened Democratic resentments at Lincoln’s administration.74

The most sensational and illuminating of these civil liberties cases concerned the Democratic candidate for governor of