Glory Road (20 page)

He-was not its most profound lawyer, nor, from the professional viewpoint, one of its most distinguished. It was noted that in pleadings before the State Supreme Court, where cases were presented upon written briefs and oral arguments were almost unknown, Morton never amounted to much. The practice of law, for him, had to be personal combat, with a visible enemy present whom one could engage with all but physical violence. It is recorded that he did little office work, but that "before a jury he was irresistible." He was a bulldozer, a fighter; he was remembered as a great massive man having "a fine leg and a large soft hand," with strangely pale skin, a great deal of coarse black hair, and a voice like the crier in the tower of darkness. In court he was savage. An associate recalled that "he literally annihilated everyone connected with the Bar of Wayne County, and walked roughshod over all the other lawyers of his circuit."
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In that time and place the law courts had the limelight, and a gifted thunderer was known by the people and could hardly avoid a political career. Morton would not have tried to avoid it. He prospered financially, handling much railroad litigation, and he moved into Indiana politics—always, from the early nineteenth century, a rough-and-tumble affair-as inevitably as water flows downhill. Like most practical politicians, he knew the pitfalls that lurk in humor, and he carefully avoided them. Many a young man, he said, had wrecked himself by being witty. "A politician who goes into wit must expect to sacrifice everything else to it. He will gain no reputation as a sound man. His judgment will be suspected."
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Morton sacrificed nothing to wit, and he early established repute as a sound man.

He was, in fact, a most orthodox Democrat to begin with, a sharp foe of the abolitionists, a man who voted in 1851 for the new Indiana constitution which ordered free Negroes not to come into the state and provided penalties for white folk who dared to hire them. In 1852 he voted for the Northern Bourbon, Franklin Pierce, and he was shaken out of soundness and orthodoxy only in 1854 by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which shook so many and so much. When the new Republican party came in he joined up as a moderate, riding along with but never espousing the anti-foreign Know-Nothing groups. In 1856 he ran unsuccessfully for governor and was accounted so much a moderate that his associate, the George W. Julian who presently became an implacable anti-slavery congressman, did not regret his defeat. At the party's state convention in 1860 Morton was anti-Seward, considering him too inflexible on the slavery issue, and pro-Lincoln. (It was at this convention that Morton was placed in nomination for lieutenant governor by "Mr. Meredith, of Wayne County";
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the same Mr. Meredith who later, as colonel of volunteer infantry, was to carry Morton's blessing to Joe Hooker in successful quest for promotion.)

No one on the outside ever knows exactly what jars a man loose, and just what happened to Morton next is a bit obscure. But by the fall of 1860 the former moderate had become a fire-eater, and before November was out he was demanding that secession be beaten down by force: "If South Carolina gets out of the Union I trust it will be at the point of the bayonet after our best efforts have failed to compel her submission to the laws." In all the North he was one of the first public men to declare for the use of force against the new Confederacy. Early in 1861 he showed up, unscheduled, at a statehouse flag-raising in Indianapolis, injecting himself into a program of pleaders for compromise, state equality, and erring-sisters-go-in-peace, to declare sharply: "I am not here to argue questions of state equality but to denounce treason."
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He was presently put into a key position. Governor Lane resigned to enter the Senate, and Morton became governor by peaceful accession, moving up from the lieutenant governorship to which Solomon Meredith, to his own subsequent glory, had nominated him. A week earlier a convention of Indiana Democrats had voted opposition to "the coercion of sister states," and over in Ohio a leading Democrat warned Jacob Cox that if it came to fighting, 100,000 Ohio Democrats would take up arms to prevent any coercive force from getting even as far south as the Ohio River.
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But Morton saw war coming and welcomed it, and by the end of April he was driving Indiana deeply into it, getting votes for men and supplies from the legislature, working hand in glove with a semi-secret "vigilance committee" of patriotic citizens which needled lukewarm legislators, worked to break up contraband trade with the South, and in general did its best to cultivate a warlike spirit along the Wabash.

Indeed, it seems that Morton had more energy and patriotic fervor than any one state could hold. He was war governor of Indiana, and working at it, but he quickly took Kentucky under his wing also and made it a Hoosier sphere of influence. Kentucky wobbled and swayed, trying to be neutral in a fight where a state could no more achieve neutrality than it could square the circle. Morton moved in, invited the Kentucky Unionist recruiter, Lovell H. Rousseau, to organize and train his troops in Indiana,
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and all in all became known as the man who kept Kentucky in the Union. This was a slight exaggeration, for a good many men kept Kentucky in the Union, but Morton was active enough to deserve a good part of the credit.

A characteristic story was told of this period. Morton made one of his frequent visits to Louisville at the height of the neutrality argument, and as always he put up at the Gait House. A member of his party, sitting in the hotel lobby looking out of the window, saw a local secessionist leader walking along the street, laughing at some joke a friend had just told. The Morton man hurried outside, walked up to the Southerner, and promptly knocked him flat. When he was asked why he did this—for the Southerner had committed no offense-he replied stoutly that no damned secessionist was going to laugh while Oliver P. Morton was in town.
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A humorless man, this Morton, with humorless followers, operating in a time and a place which had little room for laughter. He was the embodiment of the Union cause, perhaps in a way its personal proprietor, in a state where almost more than any other in the North people were feeling the tearing, agonizing cross-strains set up by the war. The Ohio River flowed through a rich valley where the folkways and habits of thought ran back to planter-land tidewater quite as much as to town-meeting New England, and where the hateful stiff-necked particularism that had brought fire and sleet and candlelight to a young and happy people could be traced to Boston quite as easily as to Charleston. More people of Southern ancestry or Southern sympathies lived in Indiana than in any other free state. Not even in Kentucky, which yearned in vain for an unattainable virginal neutrality, had the war set people against themselves more poignantly.
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If at times the war threatened to destroy more than it could possibly save, nowhere did that danger seem as real or as desperate as in Indiana. The man who proposed to take this tragically divided state and make it the keystone of the Union arch needed to be a man of uncommon force and daring.

Which, to be sure, was the least that could be said about Governor Morton. He was making himself one of the leading figures of a war which, among other things, clearly aimed to reduce the power of state governors, and he acted as if the governor of Indiana were an independent potentate with whom the government at Washington might negotiate but to whom it could issue no orders. Washington found out about this in what should have been a routine matter, the business of supplying overcoats to Indiana's soldiers.

Early in the war there were Indiana troops in the West Virginia mountains, where nights were cold, and these men lacked overcoats. Morton heard of it—he always heard of everything that happened to Indiana troops—and he made the life of the United States quartermaster at Indianapolis quite miserable, finding time also to spray letters and telegrams at Quartermaster General Meigs in Washington. Government sent him four thousand overcoats in response, but these went astray somewhere. Morton sent his private secretary out as a detective to trace the missing coats, took the matter up vigorously with General Rosecrans, the Union commander in West Virginia, and after six weeks of bickering announced that he personally would see about Indiana's overcoats thereafter. He accordingly bought some twentynine thousand of them and had them distributed to Indiana troops. Then, his natural force quite undimmed, he got the Federal government to assume his contracts.

The luckless quartermaster at Indianapolis found all of this most irregular, especially since Morton in his haste had agreed to pay prices far above the Federal maximum, but when the quartermaster (who was only a major) protested, he was transferred away from there and the business was settled Morton's way. Morton then established the Indiana Sanitary Commission, with agents and depots in Washington, Louisville, Nashville, and elsewhere, to look after Indiana soldiers, and was denounced for it by officials of the United States Sanitary Commission, who saw in this "another development of that obnoxious heresy of state sovereignty," but Morton stuck to it and was proud of his accomplishment. He also, without any authority in law, established an arsenal in Indianapolis for the manufacture of ammunition. Later he boasted that this was done "by me, on my own responsibility."
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Between times Morton raised troops. When Braxton Bragg came into Kentucky in the fall of 1862 Morton put on a big recruiting drive. There was a bounty law, but the legislature had forgotten to vote money to pay the bounties, and recruits hung back. Morton personally borrowed $100,000 from a Cincinnati merchant, borrowed $30,000 more from an Indianapolis bank, saw that the bounties were paid, and eventually got the state to pick up his notes. When the Confederate invasion reached its height he rushed green Hoosier regiments across the river to meet the Rebels, went over himself to witness Bragg's retreat, played his own strange role in the murder of General Nelson, and pulled such wires as were handy to get Buell removed from command. To Lincoln he wrote that the war would never be won by "the cold professional leader, whose heart is not in the cause." Victory would come, he said, only when leadership was given to "the hands of men who are greatly in earnest, and who are profoundly convinced of the justice of our cause."
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And Morton was greatly in earnest, which was the lump that leavened the loaf. A passionate man, he stood among high-minded Laodiceans who tried without success to command troops against passionate, earnest men from the South, and he spent the strength that was in him to get those who had no passion taken out of the places of command. He tried for a time, vainly, to get himself commissioned a major general. Then, in the dead winter of the Union cause after Fredericksburg, the whole issue of success or failure in Indiana was placed in his hands, and the times quietly challenged him to show whether he was elemental force or windy bluff.

In the fall of 1862 the Democrats had won the elections in many Northern states—among them, most notably, Indiana. As 1863 began a solid majority of the legislators convening at Indianapolis were Democrats who seemed ready to unite in the belief that there must be a better way to settle this family quarrel than one which came home so painfully to the private pocketbook and the village cemetery. These men cocked their eyes at Governor Morton, who wired Stanton that his legislature was likely to adopt a joint resolution recognizing the Confederacy and urging states of the Northwest to sever all relations with a national government dominated by New England. Morton was perhaps a bit too nervous about this, as the legislators apparently did not plan to go quite that far. They did have certain definite ideas, however, chief of which was that peace-loving Democrats rather than fire-breathing Oliver P. Morton would hereafter control Indiana's part in the war.

Morton met this legislature head-on, sending it on January 8 a governor's message full of stirring patriotic sentiments. The legislature contemptuously refused to accept this. Instead, it voted thanks to Governor Horatio Seymour of New York for the message he had just sent to his legislature, a message which denounced emancipation (recently made national policy by Abraham Lincoln) and upheld the ancient theory of states' rights, for which the Confederates were shedding much blood in Virginia and elsewhere. Having done this, the legislature voted to investigate Morton's involved financial dealings, filed and endlessly debated a whole sheaf of resolutions denouncing practically everything the Republican administration had done, and then got down to the main course: a carefully drawn bill which would take all military power away from Morton and give it to a "military board" of hand-picked Democrats, most of them strongly anti-war and every man Jack of them vehemently anti-Morton.
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To good Union men this looked like taking Indiana out of the war and ultimately losing the whole of the Middle West, and to any eye it was clear that war-weariness had reached a climax. Many things were responsible for this, including the fact that this war was most damnably complicated by plain old-fashioned politics, played with venom and without much restraint even in the piping times of peace, and played in wartime with all of its ordinary qualities at double or triple strength. It could appear, in Indiana and elsewhere, that the war was being fought for unadorned Republican supremacy at all levels, from the county courthouse on up. It could also appear that the Democratic party proposed to regain those courthouses even at the price of stopping the war and conceding Southern independence. Beneath these appearances was the possibility that the whole war was no more than a party fight, involving nothing much holier than the proper division of the loaves and the fishes. These unhappy appearances were at least partly true, although the whole truth lay beyond them; and if the people were growing heartsick and confused because of it all, they were getting the terrible casualty lists from Fredericksburg and Stone's River for their daily reading matter, and the incompetence in army command was cutting deeper and deeper into their consciousness. So Indiana might possibly, this winter, fall completely out of the war.