RESPONSES OF DISLOYAL GOVERNORS. 337 discharged. He requested each to inform him of the time when his quota might be expected at its rendezvous, as it would be there met, as soon as practicable, by an officer or officers, to muster it into the service and pay of the United States.' He directed that the oath of fidelity to the United States should be administered to every officer and man; and none were to be received under the rank of a commissioned officer who was apparently under eighteen, or over forty-five years of age, and not in physical health and vigor. He ordered that each regiment should consist, on an aggregate of officers and men, of seven hundred and eighty, which would make a total, under the call, of seventy-three thousand three hundred and ninety-one. The remainder of the seventy-five thousand called for was to be composed of troops in the District of Columbia." The The President's Proclamation, and the requisition of the Secretary of War, were received with unbounded favor and enthusiasm in the Free-labor States; while in six of the eight Slave-labor States included in the call, they were treated by the authorities with words of scorn and defiance. exceptions were Maryland and Delaware. In the other States disloyal Governors held the reins of power. "I have only to say," replied Governor Letcher, of Virginia, "that the militia of this State will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me for such an object-an object, in my judgment, not within the province of the Constitution or the Act of 1795-will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and, having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited toward the South." Governor Ellis, of North Carolina, answered:-"Your dispatch is received, and if genuine, which its extraordinary character leads me to doubt, I have to say in reply, that I regard the levy of troops, made by the Administration for the purpose of subjugating the States of the South, as in violation of the Constitution, and a usurpation of power. I can be no party. to this wicked violation of the laws of the country, and to this war upon the liberties of a free people. You can get no troops from North Carolina." Governor Magoffin, of Kentucky, replied:-"Your dispatch is received. I say emphatically that Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States." Governor Harris, of Tennessee, said:-"Tennessee will not furnish a single man for coercion, but fifty thousand, if necessary, for the defense of our rights, or those of our Southern brethren." Governor Rector, of Arkansas, replied:-" In answer at the place of rendezvous, in any one year." It was hoped that three months would be sufficient time to put down the insurrection. 1 The quota for each State was as follows. The figures denote the number of regiments. * Letter of Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, to the Governors of States, April 15, 1861. VOL L-22 4 13 6 6 1 1 1 338 OPPONENTS OF A WAR POLICY. to your requisition for troops from Arkansas to subjugate the Southern States, I have to say that none will be furnished. The demand is only adding insult to injury. The people of this Commonwealth are freemen, not slaves, and will defend, to the last extremity, their honor, their lives, and property, against Northern mendacity and usurpation." Governor Jackson, of Missouri, responded :-"There can be, I apprehend, no doubt that these men are intended to make war upon the seceded States. Your requisition, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its objects, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with. Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on such an unholy crusade." There is such a coincidence of sentiment and language in the responses of the disloyal governors, that the conviction is pressed upon the reader that the conclave of conspirators at Montgomery was the common source of their inspiration. Governor Hicks, of Maryland, appalled by the presence of great dangers, and sorely pressed by the secessionists on every side, hastened, in a proclamation, to assure the people of his State that no troops would be sent from Maryland unless it might be for the defense of the National Capital, and that they (the people) would, in a short time, “have the opportunity afforded them, in a special election for members of the Congress of the United States, to express their devotion to the Union, or their desire to see it broken up.' Governor Burton, of Delaware, made no response until the 26th, when he informed the President that he had no authority to comply with his requisition. At the same time he recommended the formation of volunteer companies for the protection of the citizens and property of Delaware, and not for the preservation of the Union. The Governor would thereby control a large militia force. How he would have employed it, had occasion required, was manifested by his steady refusal, while in office, to assist the National Government in its struggle with its enemies. In the seven excepted Slave-labor States in which insurrection prevailed, the proclamation and the requisition produced hot indignation, and were assailed with the bitterest scorn. Not in these States alone, but in the border Slave-labor States, and even in the Free-labor States, there were vehement opposers of the war policy of the Government from its inception.' One of the most influential newspapers printed west of the Alleghanies, which had opposed secession valiantly, step by step, with the keen cimeter of wit and the solid shot of argument, and professed to be then, and throughout the war, devoted to the cause of the Union, hurled back the proclama 1 The utterances of two of the leading newspapers in the city of New York, whose principal editors were afterward elected to the National Congress, gave fair specimens of the tone of a portion of the Northern press at that time. The New York Express said:-"The South can never be subjugated by the North, nor can any marked successes be achieved against them. They have us at every advantage. They fight upon their own soil, in behalf of their dearest rights-for their public institutions, their homes, and their property. The South. in self-preservation, has been driven to the wall, and forced to proclaim its independence. A servile insurrection and wholesale slaughter of the whites will alone satisfy the murderous designs of the Abolitionists. The Administration, egged on by the halloo of the Black Republican organs of this city, has sent its mercenary forces to pick a quarrel and initiate the work of desolation and ruin. A call is made for an army of volunteers, under the pretense that an invasion is apprehended of the Federal Capital; and the next step will be to summon the slave population to revolt and massacre." The New York Daily News, assuming to be the organ of the Democratic party, said:-"Let not this perfidious Administration invoke the sacred names of the Union and the Constitution, in the hope of cheating fools into the support of the war which it has begun. . . . He is no Democrat who will enter the Army, or ATTITUDE OF CONSERVATIVES. 339 tion, to the great delight and encouragement of the conspirators, and the dismay of the friends of American nationality, in the following words: "The President's Proclamation has reached us. We are struck with mingled amazement and indignation. The policy announced in the Proclamation deserves the unqualified condemnation of every American citizen. It is unworthy not only of a statesman, but of a man. It is a policy utterly hare-brained and ruinous. If Mr. Lincoln contemplated this policy in his Inaugural Address, he is a guilty dissembler; if he has conceived it under the excitement aroused by the seizure of Fort Sumter, he is a guilty Hotspur. In either case, he is miserably unfit for the exalted position in which the enemies of the country have placed him. Let the people instantly take him and his Administration into their own hands, if they would rescue the land from bloodshed and the Union from sudden and irretrievable destruction." Thus spoke the organ of the "Conservatives" of the great and influential State of Kentucky, and, indeed, of the great Valley of the Mississippi below the Ohio. Its voice was potential, because it represented the feelings of the dominant class in the Border Slave-labor States. From that hour the politicians of Kentucky, with few exceptions, endeavored to hold the people to a neutral attitude as between the National Government and the insurgents. They were successful until the rank perfidy of the conspirators and the destructive invasions of the insurgent armies taught them that their only salvation from utter ruin was to be found in taking up arms in support of the Government. The effect of that neutral policy, which, in a degree, was patriotic, because it seemed necessary to prevent the State from being properly ranked with the "seceding" States, will be observed hereafter. There seemed to be calmness only at Montgomery, the head-quarters of the conspirators. These men were intoxicated with apparent success at Charleston. In profound ignorance of the patriotism, strength, courage, temper, and resources of the people of the Free-labor States, and in their pride and arrogance, created by their sudden possession of immense power which they had wrested from the people, they coolly defied the National Government, whose reins of control they expected soon to hold. Already the so-called Secretary of War of the confederated conspirators (L. P. Walker) had revealed that expectation, in a speech from the balcony of the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery, in response to a serenade given to Davis and himself, on the evening of the day on which Fort Sumter was attacked." "No man," he said, "can tell when the war this day commenced3 will end; but I will prophesy that the flag which • April 12, 1861. volunteer to aid this diabolical policy of civil war." These utterances found echoes in many places. We may notice hero only one, that of a newspaper published in Bangor, Maine. After declaring that the South Carolinians were simply imitators of the Fathers of the Republic, it said:" When the Government at Washington calls for volunteers to carry on the work of subjugation and tyranny, under the specious phrases ^_ enforcing the laws, retaking and protecting the public property,' and collecting the revenue, let every Democrat fold his arms and bid the minions of Tory despotism do a Tory despot's work."-Quoted by Whitney in his History of the War for the Preservation of the Federal Union, i. 313. 1 Louisville Journal, April 16, 1861. * Kentucky was largely represented, at that time, by men prominent in public life. It was the native State of President Lincoln; Jefferson Davis; the late Vice-President Breckenridge; Senator John J. Crittenden ; James Guthrie, Chairman of the committee on resolutions in the Peace Convention at Washington; Major Anderson; Joseph Holt, laté Secretary of War; General Harney, and several others of less note. 3 During the war it was often asserted by the conspirators, and by the opponents of the war in the Free 340 ARROGANCE OF THE CONSPIRATORS. now flaunts the breeze here will float over the dome of the old Capitol at Washington before the first of May. Let them try Southern chivalry and test the extent of Southern resources, and it may float eventually over Faneuil Hall in Boston." Already Hooper, the Secretary of the Montgomery Convention,' had replied to the question of the agent of the Associated Press in Washington, "What is the feeling there?" by saying: "Davis answers, rough and curt, With mortar, Paixhan, and petard; 'Sumter is ours and nobody hurt. We tender Old Abe our Beau-regard.' "' Already General Pillow, of Tennessee, had hastened to Montgomery and offered the "Confederate Government" ten thousand volunteers from his parts of the "Confedample aid in men and And an adroit knave State; and assurances had come by scores from all eracy," and of the Border Slave-labor States, that money would be given to the "Southern cause." named Sanders, who had been a conspicuous politician of the baser sort in the North, and who was in Montgomery as the self-constituted representative of the "Northern Democracy," "drinking with the President [Davis], shaking hands and conversing with crowds at the hotels, and having long Jabor States, that the conflict was commenced by the National Government. This authoritative declaration of the War Minister of the "Confederacy "-" the war this day commenced"-settles the question. 1 Robert Toombs once boasted, in the Senate of the United States, that he would yet call the roll of his slaves on Bunker's Hill. 2 See page 249. The Charleston Mercury of the 16th said:-"Jefferson Davis replies to President Lincoln as follows: "With mortar, Paixhan, and petard, We tender Old Abe our Beau-regard." THE PEOPLE DECEIVED BY DEMAGOGUES. 341 talks with the Cabinet," had assured Davis and his associates that his party would "stand by the South at all hazards," and that there would be such a "divided North," that war would be impossible. Thus surrounded by an atmosphere of sophistry and adulation, which conveyed to their ears few accents of truth or reason; confident of the support of kings, and queens, and emperors of the Old World, who would rejoice if a great calamity should overtake the menacing Republic of the West, and sitting complacently at the feet of "King Cotton," "The mightiest monarch of all," ניי these men received the President's Proclamation with "derisive laughter," and for the moment treated the whole affair as a solemn farce." The press in the so-called "Confederate States," inspired by the key-note at Montgomery, in dissonance with which they dared not be heard, more vehemently than ever, and without stint ridiculed the "Yankees," as they called the people of the Free-labor States. They were spoken of as cowards, ingrates, fawning sycophants; a race unworthy of a place in the society of "Southern gentlemen;" infidels to God, religion, and morality; mercenary to the last degree, and so lacking in personal and moral courage, that "one Southron could whip five of them easily, and ten of them at a pinch." The 1 Montgomery Correspondence of the Charleston Mercury, April 10, 1861. To impress his new political associates with exalted ideas of his power as a "Democratic leader" in the North, Sanders sent, by telegraph, the following pompous dispatch to his political friends in New York:MONTGOMERY, April 14. - To Mayor WOOD, DEAN RICHMOND, and AUGUSTE BELMONT: "A hundred thousand mercenary soldiers cannot occupy and hold Pensacola. The entire South are under arms, and the negroes strengthen the military. Peace must come quickly, or it must be conquered. Northern Democrats, standing by the South will not be held responsible for Lincoln's acts, unless indorsing them. State Sovereignty must be fully recognized. Protect your social and commercial ties by resisting Republican Federal aggression. Philadelphia should repudiate the war action of the Pennsylvania Legislature. The commerce of Rhode Island and New Jersey is safe, when distinguished. Hoist your flag! "Davis's answer is rough and curt- "GEORGE N. SANDEES." This man, as we shall observe hereafter, was a conspicuous actor in the most infamous work of the conspirators during the war that ensued. First Year of the War: by E. A. Pollard, page 59. • The following advertisement is copied from the first inside business column of the Mobile Advertiser of April 16, now before me: "75,000 COFFINS WANTED. * Proposals will be received to supply the Confederacy with 75,000 BLACK COFFINS. “No proposals will be entertained coming north of Mason and Dixon's Line. Direct to Ap. 16, 1t." JEFF. DAVIS, Montgomery, Ala. This was intended as an intimation that the 75,000 men called for by President Lincoln would each need a coffin. It has been alleged, by competent authority, that Davis, in the folly of his madness, sanctioned the publication of this advertisement, to show contempt for the National Government. The Mobile Advertiser, one of the ablest and most respectable of the Southern newspapers, held the following language:- The Northern 'soldiers' are men who prefer enlisting to starvation; scurvy fellows from the back slums of cities, whom Falstaff would not have marched through Coventry with. But these are not soldiers-least of all to meet the hot-blooded, thoroughbred, impetuous men of the South. Trencher soldiers, who enlisted to war upon their rations, not on men. They are such as marched through Baltimore [the Massachusetts Sixth, admirably clothed, equipped, and disciplined, and composed of some of the best young men of New England), squalid, wretched, ragged, and half-naked, as the newspapers of that city report them. Fellows who do not know the breech of a musket from its muzzle, and had rather filch a handkerchief than fight an enemy in manly combat. White slaves, peddling wretches, small-change knaves and vagrants, the dregs and offscourings of the populace; these are the levied forces' whom Lincoln suddenly arrays as candidates for the honor of being slaughtered by gentlemen-such as Mobile sends to battle. Let them come South, and we will put our negroes to the dirty work of killing them. But they will not come South. Not a wretch of them will live on this side of the border longer than it will take us to reach the ground and drive them off." |