5
A WARY SUN PEEKED over the horizon on April 12, 1861, its rays barely able to penetrate the smoke hanging over the Confederate batteries firing on Fort Sumter. Later that morning Major Robert Anderson, commanding the unfinished island fortress, hauled down the United States flag and ordered the white flag of surrender to take its place.
The news of Fort Sumter’s surrender flashed over the telegraph wires, and a tidal wave of patriotism engulfed the North. Republican editors and politicians demanded revenge for the insult to the American flag, and many leading Democrats added their voices to the call for vengeance. “Let blood flow,” cried one indignant Democratic editor, “until the past be atoned, and a long future secured to peace, prosperity, happiness and honor.”1
President Lincoln called for 75,000 men and issued a series of proclamations as the Union’s answer to Confederate action. The North seemed to arise as one man to answer Lincoln’s call and to castigate the rebels. Democrats as well as Republicans rallied to the colors. “I am not deceived in my faith in the North,” wrote Count Adam Gurowski from his observation post in Washington, D.C.; “The excitement, the wrath is terrible. Party lines burn, dissolved by the excitement. Now the people is fusion, as bronze.”2
It was a time for soul searching. Democrats who had spoken out for compromise and against coercion had to decide what to do and say, or retreat to the shadows and hide themselves until the storm of passion passed by.
It was here that Stephen A. Douglas and Clement L. Vallandigham, allies for a dozen years, parted company. Douglas took the high road, where crowds cheered and emotion ran rampant. Vallandigham took the low road—the lonely road of the dissenter.
Those who knew Douglas must have expected him to take the high road. He had always been a Western nationalist, and he had always been a practical man, pragmatic in outlook. An apostle of manifest destiny, he did not want secession and civil war to destroy that dream. Immediately after the firing on Fort Sumter, Douglas called on President Lincoln to assure him of support. He also wrote a dispatch for the press, announcing his determination to sustain Lincoln in his efforts to preserve the Union. Then he journeyed into the Midwest to rally the countryside and urge Democrats to support the administration. “There are but two parties,” he told his followers in Springfield, “the party of patriots and the party of traitors. We belong to the first.”3 Six weeks later, struck down by typhoid, Douglas lay on his deathbed. His last words were advice to his two sons: obey the laws and support the Constitution.
Those who knew Vallandigham well must have expected him to take the road of the dissenter. He was a Western sectionalist who feared that civil war would mean the ascendancy of New England and the triumph of industrialism. He was less inclined than Douglas to be practical because he had become too wedded to principle. As an advocate of states’ rights, he was an out-and-out dogmatist. Once he had accepted a proposition, he hung on tenaciously. Once he had occupied a position, he was most reluctant to desert it. He regarded vacillation as a weakness and pussyfooting as cowardice. He chose to ignore expediency and he enjoyed courting controversy. He was introspective, self-conscious, and possessed of a sure sense of moral righteousness. He had tremendous ability and was especially well read. These factors led him to the certainty that he was right and others were wrong. Conscious of his own rectitude, he saw it as his duty to convince others. Since he detested abolitionism and blamed it for the crisis, since he mistrusted Lincoln, and since he believed war an irrational means to achieve an end, Vallandigham dissented.
He wasted little time in getting his antiwar views into print. Those who read the Dayton Empire knew that Editor J. Frederick Bollmeyer was Vallandigham’s man Friday and that the views expressed therein would be those of the master. “Having taken our position in the beginning against the policy of coercion,” Bollmeyer wrote the day after the surrender of Fort Sumter, “we intend to stand by it to the end. Whatever others may do, we stand firm and immovable against money and men for civil war.”4
Convinced he was right and dismayed because many former anticoercionists were chanting “War! War!” Vallandigham prepared a letter to place his views on record. Although he addressed his letter to the “Editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer,” he sent copies of the epistle to a dozen Democratic journals, including the Dayton Empire and the Crisis. He laid all the blame for the war at Lincoln’s doorstep, restating the refrain that he opposed a coercive war, always had, and always would. If Ohio was invaded, he would, of course, hurry to her defense and help repulse the invaders. He would expect the people of Kentucky, Virginia, or Missouri to do the same. He expressed the belief that “the surging sea of madness” would ebb and that “the sober second thought of the people” would call out against Americans “butchering each other” in a civil war. He closed by expressing his contempt for the “cowardly slanderers” of the preachers of peace. He was unafraid, he said, and rumors that he had been arrested were the work of liars and libelers. He could be found daily at his home, in his law office, or upon the streets of Dayton.5
Governor William Dennison’s call for troops in Ohio must have been somewhat embarrassing to Vallandigham, who held a brigadier general’s commission in the Ohio militia and had a new uniform, with a well-polished star upon its epaulet, hanging in a closet. Some of the Dayton companies he had organized and which belonged to his brigade marched off to war. The brigade commander stayed home, sulking in his tent.6
Vallandigham and the handful of followers who had publicly stated their opposition to the war soon began to feel a deluge of hostility. Thomas H. Hodder, the editor of the Marion Democratic Mirror, who restated Vallandigham’s contention that Lincoln had brought on the war and that Democrats should oppose coercion, suffered for his views. Self-styled patriots assaulted him on the streets of Marion and threatened to hang him and burn his newspaper plant.7 J. Frederick Bollmeyer received considerable abuse, being told bluntly that he ought to be on Jeff Davis’s payroll. William F. Comly, a master of invective, used the editorial columns of his Journal to call Bollmeyer a dozen uncomplimentary names. When Bollmeyer hoisted an American flag over the Empire office building to prove his “loyalty,” Comly flew into a rage and charged that use of the flag was a device “to hide treason most effectively.” An impassioned editorial entitled “A Traitor Publishing Treason at Our Own Doors” aroused Dayton Republicans, who suggested mob action to burn the Empire building and to hang a perfidious editor.8
Vallandigham, of course, received a great amount of abuse. The Dayton Journal denounced him for uttering “treasonable sentiments” and compared Douglas’s “laudable” course with Vallandigham’s “dastardly treason.” Had not Douglas said there could be only “patriots” and “traitors”? Vallandigham’s efforts to make the war a “partisan issue,” the paper suggested, brought disgrace and dishonor to the Third Congressional District. Since C.L.V. misrepresented his district, he ought to resign. “Could Jeff Davis desire a more faithful emissary than C. L. Vallandigham?” asked Comly. He ended his anti-Vallandigham editorial tirade with the query, “Shame, where is thy blush?”9
Most of Ohio’s well-known Democrats followed Douglas’s advice and came out for war. Samuel S. Cox made a patriotic speech in Columbus on April 22 and the venerable William Allen did the same in Greenville. David Tod and John Brough, still calling themselves Democrats, waved the flag vigorously. James J. Faran of the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote of the need to “sustain, protect, and defend the Federal Government without any reference whatever to the person who may administer it.” George W. Manypenny, editor of the widely read Ohio Statesman, preached similar doctrine and thought the times called for patriotism rather than partyism. After the editor of the Hamilton Telegraph had one copy of his newspaper returned with a rope around it and a note attached, he took the hint and said he would stand by the flag and support the war.10
A few Democrats refused to let the patriotic surge sweep them off their feet. George D. Prentice of the Louisville Journal defined Lincoln’s call for 75,000 men as “utterly hair-brained and ruinous.”11 But then, Prentice was a Kentuckian and lived in a slave state. Samuel Medary of the Crisis wrote like a prophet of gloom and seemed much more critical of Lincoln than of Jefferson Davis. Despondently, he predicted that civil rights would be quashed and the country would disappear.12 Dr. Edson B. Olds of the Ohio Eagle (Lancaster) preached partyism and bitterly condemned President Lincoln. John W. Kees of the Circleville Watchman was even less charitable; he viewed Lincoln as fool, fanatic, and figurehead rolled into one. Then, of course, there were Bollmeyer of the Empire and Vallandigham. Altogether, they were but a handful against the multitude.
In the weeks that followed the surrender of Fort Sumter, events of national importance occurred almost daily. The Baltimore riots, the Confederate seizure of Harpers Ferry, and the secession of Virginia all made headlines. Fear that a pro-Southern secret society might sieze the national capital warranted a congressional investigation. President Lincoln’s war measures, some of questionable constitutionality, caused even some flag-waving Democrats to raise their eyebrows. Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in certain areas, declared a blockade of the Confederate States, and increased the size of the army and navy by presidential order. He ordered the letting of contracts for provisions and the tools of war, and he asked Congress to convene in extraordinary session on July 4, 1861.
Vallandigham feared that Lincoln’s proclamations would help to transform the “armed peace” into an open conflict. Furthermore, he reasoned, the president had no right to usurp powers granted specifically to Congress by the Constitution. He hoped that Lincoln’s extraordinary war measures would dampen the patriotism expressed by some members of the Democracy, and tried therefore to unite Democrats in opposition to the war. He composed a circular letter suggesting that dissident Democrats meet in Chillicothe on May 15 to frame a cooperative protest against Lincoln’s war measures, and sent it to twenty-five hand-picked party members. Most of the recipients turned their backs on the letter-writer. Only four even bothered to reply; three of the respondents favored such a conference and one advised against it. Vallandigham assumed that those who failed to reply opposed the scheme, and quickly and quietly dropped the conference idea.
Since party leaders in Ohio refused him a platform to state his antiwar views, Vallandigham composed another letter in an attempt to solicit subscribers for his views. Congress ought not to sanction Lincoln’s war measures, he declared. He himself certainly would not. “I will not vote to sustain or ratify—NEVER,” Vallandigham stated determinedly; “millions for defense, not a dollar or a man for aggressive and offensive civil war.” Lincoln, in fact, deserved impeachment, he felt. Moreover, the rising national war debt would weigh down millions yet unborn. Easterners might desire war; Westerners certainly did not. This was his creed: “I am for the CONSTITUTION first, and at all hazards; for whatever can be saved by the UNION next; and for PEACE always as essential to the preservation of either.” He closed his epistle with Douglas’s statement: “War is final, eternal separation.”13
Vallandigham also stated his antiwar views in personal letters not intended for publication. One such letter he wrote to the Rev. Mr. Sabin Hough, a clergyman whose antiwar views cost him his pulpit in the Second Presbyterian Church in Dayton. Vallandigham expressed disappointment that hysteria had invaded even the churches, mocked the Prince of Peace, and made ministers “thirst for blood.” War might develop eternal separation not only of North and South, but also of West and East. “It is,” he wrote pessimistically, “too late for anything except peaceable separation.” He expressed the hope that a reaction would set in to “the madness of the hour.” Then he would step forward to lead the forces for peace. “I shall watch for the first favorable chance,” he added, “to move publicly for peace—and restoration [of the Union] if possible.”14
Vallandigham’s antiwar stand continued to draw a frontal attack by the Republican party press. Republican editors labeled him “traitor,” “secessionist,” and “champion of Jeff Davis.” C.L.V., in turn, accused Republicans of conducting a smear campaign and wrote a rebuttal to impress his friends and defend his views. He claimed to be a constitutionalist and a conservative, standing up for order, law, and reason. “My sympathies are and ever have been,” he wrote, “with my own home, my own State, and my own flag.” He wanted peace—the war must be speedily brought to “an honorable termination.” He opposed coercion. And as he was so often wont to do, he claimed that time would vindicate him.15
William F. Comly of the Dayton Journal recognized that Vallandigham had disassociated himself from the government and its war. Always a violent partisan, Comly suggested that Vallandigham resign his congressional seat. Certainly he did not represent the views of his constituents, the Republican editor declared. Time would not vindicate him, but blacken his name. “Be assured,” Comly advised Vallandigham, “that ‘Time the Avenger’ will do justice. The lives of Arnold and Burr can testify how he deals with traitors.”16
Friendships of long standing disintegrated as Daytonians argued the propriety of Lincoln’s war measures. Each side cloaked its arguments with dogmatism. Vallandigham and Bollmeyer took the strongest possible stand against the war. Even though Southerners had fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, the two Democrats blamed Lincoln and the abolitionists for bringing on the crisis and the conflict. They also believed the Southern states could not be forced back into a Union they abhorred. A true nation must be built upon good-will and trust, not on force, distrust, and self-styled superiority. Coercion would only destroy the comity of sections; it would create hatreds and intolerance, both adverse to reunion. This would lead to “a complete, final, and eternal dissolution of the country.” Yes, coercion and war would destroy and desolate a country once “fair and glorious.”17
Some twenty or thirty Dayton Democrats gathered almost nightly in the editorial offices of the Empire to read the telegraphic dispatches, discuss events of the past, and conjecture about the crisis. They discussed the policy of the Lincoln administration and saw only evil on every hand. Believing that partisanship, not statesmanship, motivated Lincoln, they measured each act of the president by their own warped constitutional yardstick. By closing their eyes to reality, they could still see compromise as a solution to the crisis, even after the Fort Sumter affair had intensified the call for national vengeance. They denounced Dayton preachers who espoused abolition and prayed for vengeance. They wondered what effect a blockade of the Mississippi would have on the economy of the Midwest, and they conjectured as to who might inherit the mantle worn so majestically by Stephen A. Douglas.18
Bollmeyer generally served as the guiding genius and arbiter of the group. Vallandigham dropped in nearly every evening to take part in the discussions and to shape the opinions of the less informed Democrats. There was a tendency to give more weight to Vallandigham’s views than they deserved, but there was a finality to his comments that convinced those seeking an answer. His ability to quote the classics, to call upon history as a witness, and to phrase opinions in scholarly terms impressed his audience and bolstered his ego. He quoted the Constitution at length—section and clause—and he also called upon Burke, Jefferson, and Calhoun to substantiate the views he expounded. As he recited Lincoln’s “usurpations” nearly every night, he appeared to be trying to convince himself as well as his satellites. Moodily pessimistic and always dogmatic, he became impatient with those who refused to be as fatalistic and gloomy as he.19
Dayton Republicans, quite naturally, developed some suspicion of those who gathered almost nightly in the office of the Empire. Some believed they constituted “a band of traitors” who merited censure or arrest, while others supposed that the members of the clan belonged to a secret, pro-Southern society called the Knights of the Golden Circle—rumors about the ephemeral organization swept Ohio periodically. Dayton Republicans, of course, made Vallandigham the target of their scorn, ridicule, and hatred. The editor of the Dayton Journal warred upon the Democratic congressman in nearly every issue. He received able assistance from the editors of the Cincinnati Gazette, the Cleveland Leader, and the Ohio State Journal. “Vallandigham,” the editor of the Cleveland Leader stated in one issue, “is a disgrace to the country and to the State he represents.” Had he used the word “misrepresents” he would have been closer to the mark. Republican editors in Ohio, through their repeated attacks upon Vallandigham, made him the best known and most hated congressman in the nation.20
The beleaguered Vallandigham seized upon anything and everything to give validity to his views. He found considerable satisfaction in the decision Chief Justice Roger B. Taney handed down in Ex Parte Merryman late in May 1861. The decision was a severe rebuke to President Lincoln and a blow for civil liberties. It was the same decision Vallandigham would have given were he in Taney’s stead.
The case had a Maryland setting. A Baltimore citizen of pro-Southern sympathies had been arrested by federal military authorities and imprisoned in Fort McHenry. No ground having been shown for his arrest, Chief Justice Taney, sitting in the Maryland circuit court, authorized a writ of habeas corpus in Merryman’s behalf and commanded General George Cadwalader to deliver up the prisoner. Cadwalader, in turn, refused to give up Merryman and cited Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus as his authority. Justice Taney then issued a writ of attachment for contempt against the general but Cadwalader refused to accept the writ and denied entrance to Fort McHenry to the marshal seeking to serve it. The chief justice then filed a long and learned opinion in Merryman’s behalf and slapped Lincoln’s hands resoundingly.
Interwoven with historical and constitutional arguments, Taney urged “extreme caution” in suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Furthermore, he pointed out, the right to suspend it belonged only to Congress; the president had no constitutional authority to effect such suspension himself. Since the civil courts were open, Taney continued, the judicial process rather than arbitrary military practices should prevail. It was the president’s sworn duty to maintain such constitutional decrees, not suppress them. In concluding, the chief justice strongly condemned Lincoln’s “act of usurpation.”21
Taney’s notable decision won praise in some Democratic quarters. Nowhere was the applause louder than in the editorial offices of the Dayton Empire. There C.L.V., repeatedly denouncing Lincoln’s sins, led the applause. Taney’s decision must have bolstered Vallandigham’s belief in his ability as a prophet.22
The approach of an economic recession also gave Vallandigham a chance to pose as a prophet—his gloom and apprehension seemed justified. After the blockade of the Mississippi River by presidential order, a depression slowly and surely began to envelop the upper Midwest. Avenues of trade disappeared and commercial firms along the Ohio River experienced hard times. Farmers also suffered, for the blockade cut off the Southern market for farm surpluses. Samuel Medary, who claimed to represent the agrarian interests, placed most of the blame for the developing depression on Lincoln and Republican policy. “It acts upon us,” he wrote in the Crisis, “much like the man who bit his nose to spite his face.”23
Vallandigham, who divided his time between his law office and the meeting rooms of the Empire, read Medary’s pithy anti-Lincoln comments. He also noted Medary’s opposition to the Union party movement, a political strategem devised by the Republicans to keep their party in the ascendancy. The Crisis editor wanted no Democrats to play ball with the fusionists. He characterized the Union party as a Republican cloak to hide their sins and transgressions. “We are opposed,” Medary wrote with single-mindedness, “to the covering up of the monstrous inequities of the State Administration by a Union ticket.”24 Vallandigham, who believed party regularity a virtue, agreed.
Late in June 1861, Vallandigham put his affairs in Dayton in order so that he could attend the emergency session of the Thirty-seventh Congress. When he boarded the east-bound train he carried several boxes of clothes and a packet of books. He also took with him the knowledge that the Democratic party was more hopelessly divided than ever. Some wanted to join the Union party movement; others opposed it. Some wished to place patriotism above partyism; others viewed party loyalty as primary. Most Democrats obviously favored coercion of the seceded states, and only a handful opposed both the Lincoln administration and the war. Meanwhile, Douglas’s death seemed to leave the northern wing of the Democracy leaderless and the party appeared to be disintegrating.
Most Democrats bowed to the wave of patriotic passion which swept the North in April, May, and June of 1861. George D. Prentice of the Louisville Journal typified those who talked like patriots, reversing his earlier position. He expected all of his Democratic colleagues to prove themselves worthy citizens. Any Democrat who opposed the war deserved castigation. Any congressman who would refuse to vote men and money to sustain the war deserved a string of epithets: “A TRAITOR, A MONSTER, A DISGRACE TO HIS ANCESTRY, A SHAME TO POSTERITY, A FOUL STAIN UPON HIS BIRTH.”25
Vallandigham left for Washington, knowing that the tidal wave of patriotism, calling for vengeance and victory, would make the life of a dissenter most unpleasant. Yet he believed his antiwar views right and Lincoln’s policy wrong. And those who knew Vallandigham best expected him to follow the course he believed right, regardless of the costs and consequences.
1 Wisconsin Daily Patriot (Madison), 20 April 1861.
2 Adam Gurowski, Dairy . . . from March 4, 1861 to November 10, 1864, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1862-1866), 1: 23.
3 Douglas’s emotion-filled Springfield speech was published in full in the Illinois State Register (Springfield), 27 April 1861.
4 13 April 1861.
5 Published in the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 20 April 1861. The letter also appears in Vallandigham, Vallandigham, pp. 159-60, but three sentences which put C.L.V. in a less favorable light are omitted.
6 Dayton Daily Journal, 17 April 1861.
7 Ibid., 23 April 1861.
8 Ibid., 16 April 1861. On the day on which Comley’s strong anti-Bollmeyer editorial appeared, he received word from Washington that he had been named Dayton’s postmaster.
9 Ibid., 22, 23 April 1861.
10 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 17, 24 April 1861; Ohio Statesman (Columbus), 23 April 1861; Dayton Daily Journal, 23 April 1861.
11 15 April 1861.
12 Crisis (Columbus), 16, 18 April 1861.
13 C.L.V. to Richard K. Hendrickson, N. G. Oglesby, John McClellan, and Others, 13 May 1861, published in Crisis, 23 May 1861.
14 26, 30 April 1861, published in Dayton Daily Journal, 18 September 1861.
15 C.L.V., “The Public Arms,” Dayton Daily Empire, 16 May 1861.
16 18 May 1861.
17 Entry of 30 May 1861, Medlar, “Journal.”
18 Ibid., entry of 23 May 1861.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., entries of 23, 30 May 1861; Cleveland Leader, 26 June 1861; Dayton Daily Journal, 12, 19 June 1861.
21 Ex Parte Merryman, 17 Federal Cases 144 (1861); The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1880-1901), ser. 2, 1: 576. (Hereafter cited as Official Records.)
22 Dayton Daily Empire, 7 June 1861; Dayton Daily Journal, 10 June 1861.
23 13 June 1861.
24 13, 27 January 1861.
25 Quoted in Dayton Daily Journal, 19 June 1861.