Volume III Part 3 (1/2)
Nevertheless, the difference between the great ma.s.s of Democrats and the supporters of the People's party was more apparent than real.[806]
Each professed undying devotion to the Union. Each, also, favoured a vigorous prosecution of the war. As the campaign advanced the activity of the army strengthened this loyalty and minimised the criticism of harsh methods. Moreover, the impression obtained that the war would soon be over.[807] McClellan was in command, and the people had not yet learned that ”our chicken was no eagle, after all,” as Lowell expressed it.[808] Controversy over the interference with slavery also became less acute. John Cochrane, now commanding a regiment at the front, declared, in a speech to his soldiers, that slaves of the enemy, being elements of strength, ought to be captured as much as muskets or cannon, and that whenever he could seize a slave, and even arm him to fight for the government, he would do so.
[Footnote 806: ”There are sympathisers with the secessionists still remaining in the Democratic ranks, but they compose a small portion of the party. Nine-tenths of it is probably strenuous in the determination that the const.i.tutional authority of the government shall be maintained and enforced without compromise. This sentiment is far more prevalent and decided than it was two months ago.”--New York _Tribune_, November 19, 1861.]
[Footnote 807: ”I have now no doubt this causeless and most flagitious rebellion is to be put down much sooner than many, myself included, thought practicable.”--Edwin Croswell, letter in New York _Tribune_, November 25, 1861.]
[Footnote 808: Political Essays, p. 94.--_North American Review_, April, 1864.]
In conducting the campaign the People's leaders discountenanced any criticism of the Government's efforts to restore the Union. ”It is not Lincoln and the Republicans we are sustaining,” wrote Daniel S.
d.i.c.kinson. ”They have nothing to do with it. It is the government of our fathers, worth just as much as if it was administered by Andrew Jackson. There is but one side to it.”[809] As a rule the Hards accepted this view, and at the ratification of the ticket in New York, on September 20, Lyman Tremaine swelled the long list of speakers. A letter was also read from Greene C. Bronson. To those who heard James T. Brady at Cooper Inst.i.tute on the evening of October 28 he seemed inspired. His piercing eyes burned in their sockets, and his animated face, now pale with emotion, expressed more than his emphatic words the loathing felt for men who had plunged their country into b.l.o.o.d.y strife.
[Footnote 809: Daniel S. d.i.c.kinson's _Life, Letters, and Speeches_, Vol. 2, pp. 550-551.]
Nevertheless, it remained for Daniel S. d.i.c.kinson to stigmatise the Democratic party. At the Union Square meeting he had burned his bridges. It was said he had nowhere else to go; that the Hards went out of business when the South went out of the Union; and that to the Softs he was _non persona grata_. There was much truth in this statement. But having once become a Radical his past affiliations gave him some advantages. For more than twenty years he had been known throughout the State as a Southern sympathiser. In the United States Senate he stood with the South for slavery, and in the election of 1860 he voted for Breckinridge. He was the most conspicuous doughface in New York. Now, he was an advocate of vigorous war and a p.r.o.nounced supporter of President Lincoln. This gave him the importance of a new convert at a camp meeting. The people believed he knew what he was talking about, and while his stories and apt ill.u.s.trations, enriched by a quick change in voice and manner, convulsed his audiences, imbedded in his wit and rollicking fun were most convincing arguments which appealed to the best sentiments of his hearers.[810] Indeed, it is not too much to say that Daniel S. d.i.c.kinson, as an entertaining and forceful platform speaker, filled the place in 1861 which John Van Buren occupied in the Free-soil campaign in 1848.
[Footnote 810: ”I have just finished a second reading of your speech in Wyoming County, and with so much pleasure and admiration that I cannot refrain from thanking you. It is a speech worthy of an American statesman, and will command the attention of the country by its high and generous patriotism, no less than by its eloquence and power.”--Letter of John K. Porter of Albany to D.S. d.i.c.kinson, August 23, 1861. _d.i.c.kinson's Life, Letters, and Speeches_, Vol. 2, p. 553.
Similar letters were written by Henry W. Rogers of Buffalo, William H.
Seward, Dr. N. Niles, and others.--_Ibid._, pp. 555, 559, 561.]
A single address by Horatio Seymour, delivered at Utica on October 28, proved his right to speak for the Democratic party. He had a difficult task to perform. Men had changed front in a day, and to one of his views, holding rebellion as a thing to be crushed without impairing existing conditions, it seemed imperative to divorce ”revolutionary emanc.i.p.ators” from the conservative patriots who loved their country as it was. He manifested a desire to appear scrupulously loyal to the Government, counseling obedience to const.i.tuted authorities, respect for const.i.tutional obligations, and a just and liberal support of the President, in whose favour every presumption should be given. The suspension of the writ of _habeas corpus_ and the long list of arbitrary arrests had provoked Seymour as it did many conservative Republicans, but however much individual rights may be violated, he said, so long as the country is engaged in a struggle for its existence, confidence, based upon the a.s.sumption that imperative reasons exist for these unusual measures, must be reposed in the Administration. This was the incarnation of loyalty.
But Seymour closed his address with an ugly crack of the whip.
Dropping his well-selected words with the skill of a practised debater, he blended the history of past wrongs with those of the present, thus harrowing his auditors into a frame of mind as resentful and pa.s.sionate as his own. When the public safety permits, he said threateningly, there will be abundant time to condemn and punish the authors of injustice and wrong, whether they occupy the presidential chair or seats in the cabinet. ”Let them remember the teachings of history. Despotic governments do not love the agitators that call them into existence. When Cromwell drove from Parliament the latter-day saints and higher-law men of his day, and 'bade them cease their babblings;' and when Napoleon scattered at the point of the bayonet the Council of Five Hundred and crushed revolution beneath his iron heel, they taught a lesson which should be heeded this day by men who are animated by a vindictive piety or a malignant philanthropy....
It is the boast of the Briton that his house is his castle. However humble it may be, the King cannot enter. Let it not be said that the liberties of American citizens are less perfectly protected, or held less sacred than are those of the subjects of a Crown.”
The slavery question was less easily and logically handled. He denied that it caused the war, but admitted that the agitators did, putting into the same cla.s.s ”the ambitious man at the South, who desired a separate confederacy,” and ”the ambitious men of the North, who reaped a political profit from agitation.” In deprecating emanc.i.p.ation he carefully avoided the argument of military necessity, so forcibly put by John Cochrane, and strangely overlooked the fact that the South, by the act of rebellion, put itself outside the protection guaranteed under the Const.i.tution to loyal and law-abiding citizens. ”If it be true,” he said, ”that slavery must be abolished to save this Union, then the people of the South should be allowed to withdraw themselves from the Government which cannot give them the protection guaranteed by its terms.” Immediate emanc.i.p.ation, he continued, would not end the contest. ”It would be only the commencement of a lasting, destructive, terrible domestic conflict. The North would not consent that four millions of free negroes should live in their midst.... With what justice do we demand that the South should be subjected to the evils, the insecurity, and the loss of const.i.tutional rights, involved in immediate abolition?” Then, dropping into prophecy, the broad, optimistic statesmans.h.i.+p of the forties pa.s.sed into eclipse as he declared that ”we are either to be restored to our former position, with the Const.i.tution unweakened, the powers of the State unimpaired, and the fireside rights of our citizens duly protected, or our whole system of government is to fall!”
Seymour, in closing, very clearly outlined his future platform. ”We are willing to support this war as a means of restoring our Union, but we will not carry it on in a spirit of hatred, malice, or revenge. We cannot, therefore, make it a war for the abolition of slavery. We will not permit it to be made a war upon the rights of the States. We shall see that it does not crush out the liberties of the citizen, or the reserved powers of the States. We shall hold that man to be as much a traitor who urges our government to overstep its const.i.tutional powers, as he who resists the exercise of its rightful authority. We shall contend that the rights of the States and the General Government are equally sacred.”[811]
[Footnote 811: _Public Record of Horatio Seymour_, pp. 32-43.]
If the campaign contributed to the South a certain degree of comfort, reviving the hope that it would yet have a divided North to contend against, the election, giving d.i.c.kinson over 100,000 majority, furnished little encouragement. The People's party also carried both branches of the Legislature, securing twenty out of thirty-two senators, and seventy out of the one hundred and twenty-eight a.s.semblymen. Among the latter, Henry J. Raymond and Thomas G. Alvord, former speakers, represented the undaunted mettle needed at Albany.
To add to the result so gratifying to the fusionists, George Opd.y.k.e defeated Fernando Wood by a small plurality for mayor of New York.
Wood had long been known as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He talked reform and grew degenerate; he proclaimed patriotic views and held disloyal sentiments; he listened respectfully to public opinion, and defied it openly in his acts. He did not become a boss. It was ten years later before William M. Tweed centralised Tammany's power in one man. But Wood developed the system that made a boss possible. He dominated the police, he organised the lawless, he allied himself with the saloon, and he used the judiciary. In 1858, being forced out of Tammany, he retreated like a wounded tiger to Mozart Hall, organised an opposition society that took its name from the a.s.sembly room in which it met, and declared with emphasis and expletives that he would fight Tammany as long as he lived. From that moment his shadow had kept sachems alarmed, and his presence had thrown conventions into turmoil.
The arts of the card-sharper and thimble-rigger had been prodigally employed to save the candidate of Mozart Hall. Even the sachems of Tammany, to avert disaster, nominated James T. Brady, whose great popularity it was believed would draw strength from both Opd.y.k.e and Wood; but Brady refused to be used. Opd.y.k.e had been a liberal, progressive Democrat of the Free-Soil type and a pioneer Republican.
He a.s.sociated with Chase in the Buffalo convention of 1848 and cooperated with Greeley in defeating Seward in 1860. He had also enjoyed the career of a busy and successful merchant, and, although fifty years old, was destined to take a prominent part in munic.i.p.al politics for the next two decades. One term in the a.s.sembly summed up his office-holding experience; yet in that brief and uneventful period jobbers learned to shun him and rogues to fear him. This was one reason why the brilliant and audacious leader of Mozart Hall, in his death struggle with an honest man, suddenly a.s.sumed to be the champion of public purity.
CHAPTER III
”THE MAD DESPERATION OF REACTION”
1862
Notwithstanding its confidence in General McClellan, whose success in West Virginia had made him the successor of General Scott, giving him command of all the United States forces, the North, by midsummer, became profoundly discouraged. Many events contributed to it. The defeat at Ball's Bluff on the Potomac, which Roscoe Conkling likened to the battle of Cannae, because ”the very pride and flower of our young men were among its victims,”[812] had been followed by conspicuous incompetence at Mana.s.sas and humiliating failure on the Peninsula. Moreover, financial difficulties increased the despondency.
At the outbreak of hostilities practical repudiation of Southern debts had brought widespread disaster. ”The fabric of New York's mercantile prosperity,” said the _Tribune_, ”lies in ruins, beneath which ten thousand fortunes are buried. Last fall the merchant was a capitalist; to-day he is a bankrupt.”[813] In September, 1861, these losses aggregated $200,000,000.[814] Besides, the strain of raising sufficient funds to meet government expenses had forced a suspension of specie payment and driven people to refuse United States notes payable on demand without interest. Meantime, the nation's expenses aggregated $2,000,000 a day and the Treasury was empty. ”I have been obliged,”