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

Ohio in 1863, Clement Laird Vallandigham. Forty-three years old and the most handsome politician in America, Vallandigham sat in Congress from 1858 until 1863, when Republicans in the Ohio legislature successfully gerrymandered his district out from under him. It was not hard to see why. Vallandigham wore the “Copperhead” tag as a badge of honor, even to the point of fashioning a lapel pin made from the head of a copper penny. “I am not a Northern man. I have little sympathy with the North, no very good feeling for, and I am bound to her by no tie whatsoever, other than what once were and ought always to be among the strongest of all ties—a common language and common country,” Vallandigham said in 1859. If anything, he was as much a secessionist and sectionalist as the Calhounites. “I am a Western Man, by birth, in habit, by education… and … wholly devoted to Western interests,” even “a Western Sectionalist, and so shall continue to the day of my death.”75

In January 1863 Vallandigham decided to run for governor of Ohio, and thereupon he ran afoul of Major General Ambrose Burnside. A thoroughgoing War Democrat and now commander of the Department of the Ohio, Burnside issued a general order that forbade “the habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy” and threatened that “persons committing such offenses will be at once arrested, with a view to being tried… or sent beyond our lines into the lines of their friends”—“their friends,” of course, meaning the Confederates. Vallandigham became an obvious target for Burnside’s order, and on May 1, 1863, Burnside planted several spies in an election crowd that Vallandigham was due to address. Vallandigham made numerous incautious remarks about a “wicked, cruel, and unnecessary war” that was “not being waged for the preservation of the Union” but for “the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism,” and he declared “that he was at all times, and upon all occasions, resolved to do what he could to defeat the attempts now being made to build up a monarchy upon the ruins of our free government.” In peacetime this sort of rhetoric would hardly have gotten Vallandigham more than a few column-inches in the newspapers, but now it was enough to set General Burnside off like a Roman candle. Four days later, a company of Federal soldiers broke down the door of Vallandigham’s house and hauled him off to Cincinnati for a military trial.76

Vallandigham was no fool: though a military commission easily found him guilty of violating Burnside’s general order and sentenced him to imprisonment in Fort Warren, in Boston harbor, he appealed for a writ of habeas corpus and cast himself as a martyr in the cause of the Constitution. Sensing the political Pandora’s box that Vallandigham’s arrest could easily open, Lincoln changed his sentence from imprisonment to banishment in the Confederacy. But Lincoln was unable to escape the eruption of attack and abuse from Northern Democrats that followed, and when the Ohio Democrats met in Columbus in June to select a nominee for the Ohio governorship, a crowd of as many as 100,000 showed up to demand Vallandigham’s nomination. Vallandigham’s absentee campaign slowly evaporated without his magnetic presence, however, and a daring Confederate raid into Ohio under John Hunt Morgan frightened Ohioans into a clearer sense of their wartime priorities. When the votes were tallied in the fall elections, Vallandigham lost his long-distance bid for the governorship by 100,000 votes. Relieved, Lincoln turned his attention to matters other than Vallandigham, and when he was advised in the summer of 1864 that Vallandigham had slipped back into Ohio, disguising himself with a set of false whiskers and a cape, Lincoln merely recommended that the new departmental commander leave Vallandigham alone. “Watch Vallandigham and others closely,” Lincoln advised, but “otherwise do not arrest without further order. …”77

The oddity of the Democratic protests over Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the Vallandigham arrest was how atypical the Vallandigham, Merryman, and Milligan cases were. When historians have looked closely at the record of civil arrests under Lincoln’s administration, most of them have turned out to be arrests for wartime racketeering, the imprisonment of captured blockade runners, deserters, and the detention of suspicious Confederate citizens, not the imprisonment of political dissenters; most of the cases concerning the notorious military commissions occurred, in fact, in areas of the occupied Confederacy, not in the North.78 The Vallandigham case notwithstanding, Lincoln was as undisposed to erect a political despotism over the North as he was to fashion a legislative despotism over Congress. When measured against the far vaster civil liberties violations levied on German Americans and Japanese Americans in America’s twentieth-century world wars, Lincoln’s casual treatment of Vallandigham appears almost dismissive.

Lincoln’s presidency has often been characterized as a “war presidency,” and indeed Lincoln’s four years as president are unique for having coincided almost in their entirety with a condition of war. Still, that should not distract attention from the very considerable energy he devoted to domestic issues. In addition to rebuilding the national banking system, Lincoln and his Congress introduced a sweeping new tariff plan—the Morrill Tariff, named for Vermont senator Justin Smith Morrill—that would offer the shield of import duties not only to American manufacturing but to agriculture and mining as well. The Morrill Tariff, which came into effect even before Lincoln took office, pegged tariffs as high as 36 percent; thus it “radically changed the policy of our customs duties,” wrote Maine congressman James Blaine, “and put the nation in the attitude of self-support in manufactures.” A Homestead Act, introduced by the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy at the opening of the first regular session of the 37th Congress, opened up 160-acre blocks of federal lands in the western territories at the fire-sale price of $1.25 an acre. No longer could pro-slavery propagandists such as George Fitzhugh boast that Northern factory workers were just as enslaved to their benches as black slaves were to their plantations;