CHAPTER 27
I enclose an extract from a letter received at this department from which it would appear that you are a member of a secret league, the object of which is to overthrow the government. Any explanations upon the subject which you may offer would be acceptable.
—WILLIAM SEWARD TO FRANKLIN PIERCE,DECEMBER 20, 1861
Pierce ~ Lincoln ~ Van Buren
As the Army of the Potomac headed for the Virginia Peninsula, Milton Latham of California took the Senate floor and revealed an explosive exchange of letters between the secretary of state and a former president. The first was drafted by a State Department clerk and signed by William Seward, addressed to Franklin Pierce on December 20, 1861. Enclosed was a copy of an anonymous letter dated North Branch, October 5, 1861. “President P—in his passage has drawn many brave and influential men to the league.” The writer suggested that “the league” was working to undermine the Union, “preparing the minds of the people for a great change.”
On Christmas Eve, 1861, Pierce responded, “Sir: A package indorsed Department of State, U.S.A., franked by W. Hunter, chief clerk, and addressed to Franklin Pierce, esq., Concord N.H. was received by me to-day, having been forwarded to the place of my residence.” If he were not familiar with Mr. Hunter, Pierce said, he would have assumed it was some kind of prank. “I must I suppose, though I do so reluctantly, now view it in a different light.
“It is not easy to conceive how any person could give credence to or entertain for a moment the idea that I am now or have ever been connected with a secret league or with any league the object of which was or is to overthrow the government of my country.
“Nothing but the gravity of the insinuation, the high official source whence it emanates and the distracted condition of our recently united, prosperous and happy country could possibly lift this matter above ridicule and contempt.” Pierce was especially put off that a clerk had been the one to request an answer, rather than Seward himself. Pierce distributed the letters among his associates for comment. Word made its way to Martin Van Buren, who believed Pierce firmly in the right. “All condemn Seward and pronounce your letter perfect,” one friend replied.
On December 30 came Seward’s defiant reply. In the meantime, he had learned the note had been written by someone attempting to play a joke on the Detroit press. “An injurious aspersion on your fair fame and loyalty came into my hands. Although it was in an anonymous letter the writer was detected and subsequently avowed the authorship.”
Seward acknowledged he had given Pierce offense. “I regret it and apologize for it with the only excuse I can make, namely, the necessity of employing another head to do what ought to be done and yet which I had not the time to do personally.”
Seward went on to explain that he was doing Pierce a favor by giving him a chance to place his answer in the State Department files along with the anonymous note, and “the unkindness of that answer does not in the least diminish the satisfaction with which I have performed in the best way I was able a public duty with a desire to render you a service.”
On January 7, Pierce wrote, “It could hardly have surprised you to learn that I failed to discover in your official note, a desire to render me a service. You will excuse me if I regard even the suggestion from a source so eminent that I am ‘a member of a secret league, the object of which is to overthrow the government,’ as rather too grave to have been sent off with as little consideration as a note of rebuke might have been addressed to a delinquent clerk of one of the departments.
“I think you will upon reflection arrive at the conclusion that the whole ground upon which the allegation is repeated should as a simple act of justice been placed before me.”
One of Pierce’s friends urged him to take this “most impudent, insulting, and atrocious charge” public, “not merely for your own sake to settle the vile slander of others, but because the interests of the people would be served by the exposure of the contemptible knavery of this political mountebank.”
Pierce was increasingly concerned with the state of civil liberties. He followed “with unusual interest and satisfaction” debates in the Senate on military arrests and detention and the suspension of habeas corpus. “The power,” Pierce noted, “without charge, without examination, without opportunity of reply, at the click of a telegraph, to arrest a man in a peaceable portion of the country and impression him” is “the essence of despotism.” He was shocked that the public did not seem to share his outrage. “When history shall be written up, that at this period of the Republic, the constitutional safeguards of personal liberty could have been so easily and with so little apparent concern, swept away.” The letter of Seward demonstrated for him “the slight grounds, or the groundless suspicions, upon which, in these times, citizens are . . . to suffer in reputation, if not in loss of liberty.”
Pierce further argued that a Union without personal liberty “is not the Union, which they have cherished and to the restoration of which they look, with earnest desire and hope,” and that they cannot “without danger, suffer any breach of the Constitution to pass unnoticed.”
For his part, Pierce seemed content to let his correspondence with Seward lie “in quietness upon the files of the Department.” That was until the Detroit Tribune printed the anonymous letter. The Republican press fanned the flames, and Pierce now felt it necessary to correct the record.
As word of the exchange with Seward became public, Pierce wrote Latham in asking him to introduce a resolution calling for the entire correspondence to be published. He followed up by advising Latham on how to handle the matter, urging him to ask which “official source” placed it in theDetroit Tribune, and in light of press censorship, who authorized the publication of the letter.
Unsurprisingly, Pierce would get the better of Seward. Letters arrived praising Pierce’s “dignified and manly” response, and condemning the administration. One asked, “When suspicions, no better founded, can reach you, what security has the private citizen who has no public record to disarm them? I will not express the pleasure which I felt as he [Seward] winced under your hands.”
The Pittsfield Sun reported that the incident “Exploded . . . in a manner that does not reflect credit on the administration of that Department during the past year. It seems that a Mr. Hopkins wrote an anonymous letter, for the purpose of playing a practical joke on a Detroit or other paper, and inducing the editors to believe that they had discovered a secession plot.
“An anonymous letter, written in joke, finds its way to the State Department, and is ground sufficient for what cannot but be regarded as a very offensive letter to an Ex-President of the United States.”
In the court of public opinion, in his ongoing battle against the administration, Franklin Pierce had the upper hand—for now.