Volume III Part 3 (2/2)

wrote the Secretary of the Treasury, ”to draw for the last installment of the November loan.”[815]

[Footnote 812: _Congressional Globe_, January 6, 1862.]

[Footnote 813: New York _Tribune_, May 27, 1861.]

[Footnote 814: _Ibid._, September 18.]

[Footnote 815: Letter of Secretary Chase, dated February 3, 1862.--E.G.

Spaulding, _History of the Legal Tender_, p. 59.]

To meet this serious financial condition, Elbridge G. Spaulding of Buffalo, then a member of Congress, had been designated to prepare an emergency measure to avoid national bankruptcy. ”We must have at least $100,000,000 during the next three months,” he wrote, on January 8, 1862, ”or the government must stop payment.”[816] Spaulding, then fifty-two years of age, was president of a bank, a trained financier, and already the possessor of a large fortune. Having served in the Thirty-first Congress, he had returned in 1859, after an absence of eight years, to remain four years longer. Strong, alert, and sufficiently positive to be stubborn, he possessed the confidence of Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, who approved his plan of issuing $100,000,000 legal-tender, non-interest bearing treasury notes, exchangeable at par for six-twenty bonds.

Spaulding fully appreciated the objections to his policy, but the only other course, he argued, was to sell bonds as in the war of 1812, which, if placed at six percent interest, would not, in his opinion, bring more than sixty cents--a ruinous method of conducting hostilities. However, his plea of necessity found a divided committee and in Roscoe Conkling a most formidable opponent, who attacked the measure as unnecessary, extravagant, unsound, without precedent, of doubtful const.i.tutionality, and morally imperfect.[817]

[Footnote 816: Spaulding, _History of the Legal Tender_, p. 18.]

[Footnote 817: The bill escaped from the committee by one majority.]

It was in this debate that Conkling, adroitly choosing the right time and the proper subject, impressed the country with his power as an orator and his ability as a brilliant, resourceful debater, although, perhaps, a destructive rather than constructive legislator. Nature had lavished upon him superb gifts of mind and person. He was of commanding, even magnificent presence, six feet three inches tall, with regular features, lofty forehead, and piercing eyes,--blond and gigantic as a viking. It was difficult, indeed, for a man so superlatively handsome not to be vain, and the endeavour upon his part to conceal the defect was not in evidence. Although an unpopular and unruly schoolboy, who refused to go to college, he had received a good education, learning much from a scholarly father, a college-bred man, and an ornament to the United States District Court for more than a quarter of a century. Moreover, from early youth Conkling had studied elocution, training a strong, slightly musical voice, and learning the use of secondary accents, the choice of words, the value of deliberate speech, and the a.s.sumption of an impressive earnestness. In this debate, too, he discovered the talent for ridicule and sarcasm that distinguished him in later life, when he had grown less considerate of the feelings of opponents, and indicated something of the imperiousness and vanity which clouded an otherwise attractive manner.

As he stubbornly and eloquently contested the progress of the legal-tender measure with forceful argument and a wealth of information, Conkling seemed likely to deprive Spaulding of the t.i.tle of ”father of the greenback” until the Secretary of the Treasury, driven to desperation for want of money, reluctantly came to the Congressman's rescue and forced the bill through Congress.[818] By midsummer, however, gold had jumped to seventeen per cent., while the cost of the war, augmented by a call for 300,000 three years' men and by a draft of 300,000 nine months' militia, rested more heavily than ever upon the country. Moreover, by September 1 McClellan had been deprived of his command, the Army of the Potomac had suffered defeat at the second battle of Bull Run, and Lee and Longstreet, with a victorious army, were on their way to Maryland. The North stood aghast!

[Footnote 818: On Spaulding's motion to close debate, Conkling demanded tellers, and the motion was lost,--yeas, 52; nays, 62.--_Congressional Globe_, February 5, 1862; _Ibid._, p. 618.]

Much more ominous than military disaster and financial embarra.s.sment, however, was the divisive sentiment over emanc.i.p.ation. Northern armies, moving about in slave communities, necessarily acted as a constant disintegrating force. Slaves gave soldiers aid and information, and soldiers, stimulated by their natural hostility to slave-owners, gave slaves protection and sympathy. Thus, very early in the war, many men believed that rebellion and slavery were so intertwined that both must be simultaneously overthrown. This sentiment found expression in the Fremont proclamation, issued on August 30, 1861, setting free all slaves owned by persons who aided secession in the military department of Missouri. On the other hand, the Government, seeking to avoid the slavery question, encouraged military commanders to refuse refuge to the negroes within their lines, and in modifying Fremont's order to conform to the Confiscation Act of August 6, the President aroused a discussion characterised by increasing acerbity, which divided the Republican party into Radicals and Conservatives. The former, led by the _Tribune_, resented the att.i.tude of army officers, who, it charged, being notoriously in more or less thorough sympathy with the inciting cause of rebellion, failed to seize opportunities to strike at slavery. Among Radicals the belief obtained that one half of the commanding generals desired to prosecute the war so delicately that slavery should receive the least possible harm, and in their comments in Congress and in the press they made no concealment of their opinion, that such officers were much more anxious to restore fugitive slaves to rebel owners than to make their owners prisoners of war.[819] They were correspondingly flattering to those generals who proclaimed abolition as an adjunct of the war.

Greeley's taunts had barbed points. ”He is no extemporised soldier, looking for a presidential nomination or seat in Congress,” he said of General Hunter, whose order had freed the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. ”He is neither a political or civil engineer, but simply a patriot whose profession is war, and who does not understand making war so as not to hurt your enemy.”[820]

[Footnote 819: New York _Tribune_, July 30, 1862.]

[Footnote 820: _Ibid._, August 4.]

When the _Times_, an exponent of the Conservatives, defended the Administration's policy with the declaration that slaves were used as fast as obtained,[821] the _Tribune_ minimized the intelligence of its editor. ”Consider,” it said, ”the still unmodified order of McDowell, issued a full year ago, forbidding the harbouring of negroes within our lines. Consider Halleck's order, now nine months old and still operative, forbidding negroes to come within our lines at all.

McClellan has issued a goodly number of orders and proclamations, but not one of them offers protection and freedom to such slaves of rebels as might see fit to claim them at his hands. His only order bearing upon their condition and prospects is that which expelled the Hutchinsons from his camp for the crime of singing anti-slavery songs.”[822]

[Footnote 821: New York _Times_, July 17, 1862.]

[Footnote 822: New York _Tribune_, July 19, 1862.]

The dominant sentiment in Congress reflected the feeling of the Radicals, and under the pressure of McClellan's reverses before Richmond, the House, on July 11, and the Senate on the following day, pa.s.sed the Confiscation Act, freeing forever the slaves of rebel owners whenever within control of the Government. The Administration's failure to enforce this act in the spirit and to the extent that Congress intended, finally brought out the now historic ”Prayer of Twenty Millions”--an editorial signed by Horace Greeley and addressed to Abraham Lincoln. It charged the President with being disastrously remiss in the discharge of his official duty and unduly influenced by the menaces of border slave State politicians. It declared that the Union was suffering from timid counsels and mistaken deference to rebel slavery; that all attempts to put down rebellion and save slavery are preposterous and futile; and that every hour of obeisance to slavery is an added hour of deepened peril to the Union. In conclusion, he entreated the Chief Executive to render hearty and unequivocal obedience to the law of the land.[823]

[Footnote 823: _Ibid._, August 20.

Lincoln's reply appeared in the _National Intelligencer_ of Was.h.i.+ngton. He said in part: ”I would save the Union. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more when I shall believe doing more will help the cause.”--_Lincoln's Works_, Vol. 2, p. 227.]

Thus did Greeley devote his great powers to force Lincoln into emanc.i.p.ation. It is impossible, even at this distance of time, to turn the pages of his ponderous volumes without feeling the matchless force of his energy, the strength of his masterly array of facts, his biting sarcasm, his bold a.s.sumptions, and his clear, unadorned style. There is about it all an impa.s.sioned conviction, as if he spoke because he could not keep silent, making it impossible to avoid the belief that the whole soul and conscience of the writer were in his work. Day after day, with kaleidoscopic change, he marshalled arguments, facts, and historical parallels, bearing down the reader's judgment as he swept away like a great torrent the criticisms of himself and the arguments of his opponents. Nothing apparently could withstand his onslaught on slavery. With one dash of his pen he forged sentences that, lance-like, found their way into every joint of the monster's armour.

Greeley's criticism of the President and the army, however, gave his enemies vantage ground for renewed attacks. Ever since he suggested, at the beginning of hostilities, that the _Herald_ did not care which flag floated over its office, James Gordon Bennett, possessing the genuine newspaper genius, had daily evinced a deep, personal dislike of the _Tribune's_ editor, and throughout the discussion of emanc.i.p.ation, the _Herald_, in bitter editorials, kept its columns in a glow, tantalising the _Tribune_ with a persistency that recalls Cheetham's attacks upon Aaron Burr. The strategical advantage lay with the _Herald_, since the initiative belonged to the _Tribune_, but the latter had with it the preponderating sentiment of its party and the growing influence of a war necessity. Greeley fought with a broad-sword, swinging it with a vigorous and well-aimed effect, while Bennett, with lighter weapon, p.r.i.c.ked, stabbed, and cut. Never inactive, the latter sought to aggravate and embitter. Greeley, on the contrary, intent upon forcing the Administration to change its policy, ignored his tormentor, until exasperation, like the gathering steam in a geyser, drove him into further action. In this prolonged controversy the _Tribune_ invariably referred to its adversary as ”the _Herald_,”

but in the _Herald_, ”Greeley,” ”old Greeley,” ”poor Greeley,” ”Mars Greeley,” ”poor crazy Greeley,” became synonyms for the editor of the _Tribune_.

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