The Lost Gettysburg Address (21 page)

On January 7,
Rosecrans approached Anderson about the
reorganization of the army. He suggested that Anderson might consider
commanding a brigade. Anderson put him off. Nothing would be
happening any time soon, Anderson figured, so he requested leave to
go home and recuperate. He made a brief speech to his old comrades
at the Ohio State House on January 13, but the effort only fatigued
him further. Unsure of his ability to return to the field, Anderson
resigned his commission on February 21, 1863. He left the job of
leading the Ninety-Third Ohio Infantry to his capable
second-in-command, thirty-four-year-old
Hiram Strong. Strong was anxious to
prove himself worthy of the challenge, as he had missed the Battle of
Stones River due to pressing family business back home. Anderson’s
retirement may have saved his own life, but Strong would fall just a
few months later, mortally wounded while commanding the
Ninety-Third Ohio at Chickamauga.
¹⁰

A
S SPRING 1863 APPROACHED
, Charles Anderson’s health
took another turn for the worse. A severe case of bronchitis
ebbed, but his constant adversary (asthma) returned with a
vengeance. As Anderson lay in his bed back home in Dayton, an old
friend and political rival was planning his next move after losing his
seat in Congress that fall. The brilliant and handsome
Clement L.
Vallandigham had many of the same talents as Anderson, combined
with one quality that his fellow attorney lacked: limitless ambition.

Val, as nearly everyone called him, had known Anderson on the
judicial circuit and later in the Ohio state legislature. He had worked
harder than Anderson and had become one of the leading attorneys
in Dayton. He had also become an immensely popular leader among
Ohio Democrats. Although Anderson was a devoted Henry Clay
Whig, the political differences between the two charismatic men did
not prevent them from becoming close friends. When Vallandigham’s
son Willie died suddenly in 1848, he was overwhelmed with grief. He
marveled at the support he received from the local community. “Mr.
Anderson was an especial comfort to us,” Vallandigham wrote to his
brother, “He is an extraordinary man.”
¹

Unlike Anderson, however, Vallandigham was a man of humble
birth and few resources. The cemetery plot where his son lay was
the only piece of ground on earth that he owned when he buried the
boy.
Edwin M. Stanton, who later became Lincoln’s secretary of war,
recognized the potential in the young attorney and lent him five
hundred dollars to open a law practice. Like Anderson, Vallandigham
possessed a superior intellect and was well-read and fervently
self-righteous. He and Anderson reviled the abolitionist extremists
for playing their part in driving the country toward disunion; but
Vallandigham lacked the perspective that Anderson had gained from
his intimate experiences with the Southern conspirators. As war
neared, their differences grew and the friendship ended.

Vallandigham was ever conscious of an opportunity to steal the
spotlight in order to promote himself and his political opinions.
When he learned of
John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry in October
1859, he rushed to the scene. One of his colleagues in Congress heard
of the visit and called Vallandigham a “pettifogging inquisitor.” The
Cincinnati Commercial
derided Vallandigham’s questioning that
“probed among Brown’s wounds for material with which to
manufacture political capital.” Vallandigham made the convincing
argument that Brown was a terrorist who deserved to hang. He chastised
abolition enthusiasts such as
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who attempted
to canonize Brown. Society is based on the rule of law, Vallandigham
insisted. No high moral principles could justify outright murder.

If Brown’s raid was the spark that might light the fire of disunion
and civil war, then Vallandigham was determined to extinguish it. In
the lively discussions that followed in the Thirty-Fifth Congress, he
made a landmark speech that defined his position as the leader of the
antiwar movement, while exacerbating sectional rivalries in a unique
way. It was an intensely partisan oration. Vallandigham blamed the
Republicans for forming a party along sectional lines to further
agitate the differences between North and South. Northern radicals, he
argued, were trampling the Constitution and its purposeful balance
between the interests of free and slave states. Making Brown into a
martyr, Vallandigham reasoned, meant placing abolitionist doctrine
above the sacred law of the land. This was an odious notion on its
face. It was certainly no reason to break up the Union and risk
commencing a devastating civil war.

While Vallandigham preached unity on the one hand, the focus of
his speech was the special interests of the West. He took advantage of
the increased sectional tensions by pressing his own sectional agenda
in Congress. Members should exercise care, Vallandigham advised,
not to ignore the interest of his part of the Union. He boasted that he
was “as good a Western fire eater as the hottest salamander in this
House.” He would advocate for the welfare of the West, Vallandigham
vowed, to his dying day. His bold proclamation of a third political
section put a stake in the ground that he stood by stubbornly for the
rest of his public life. Vallandigham’s Western factionalism led to
unusual and dangerous proposals. By tirelessly promoting such radical
ideas, he would become one of the most controversial figures of the
Civil War era.

With war on the doorstep, Vallandigham and Anderson shared
some common ground. Both supported the last-ditch efforts of
Larz
Anderson and
John J. Crittenden to save the Union by extending the
Missouri Compromise line westward. When those efforts failed and
seven states had seceded, Vallandigham became morose. As the Union
dissolved before his eyes, he compared his helpless feelings with “one
who watches over the couch of his beloved mother slowly dying,”
with no power to save her. When the news of
Robert Anderson’s
surrender of Fort Sumter reached Ohio, most citizens clamored for
war. Vallandigham dug in his heels. President Lincoln and his
abolition friends had brought on this war through coercion, Vallandigham
maintained. Democrats should oppose the war on those grounds.
Many of his friends were too busy volunteering for service to stop
and listen. Vallandigham, who commanded Dayton’s militia, left his
uniform hanging in his closet and stayed home while his neighbors
marched off to defend their country. One local newspaper called
Vallandigham “invincible in peace, invisible in war.”

The
Dayton Journal
urged Vallandigham to resign at once, on
account of his “treasonable sentiments.” The
Journal
’s editor
asked, “Could Jeff Davis desire a more faithful emissary than C. L.
Vallandigham? Shame where is thy blush?” Vallandigham was left
standing nearly alone among such well-known Ohio Democrats as
Samuel S. Cox,
William Allen,
David Tod, and
John Brough. They all
rallied behind the flag. Party loyalties took a back seat to patriotism.
Vallandigham stood his ground under a withering verbal assault.
Lincoln’s suspension of the right of habeas corpus, his naval
blockade of the Confederate States, and the raising of a huge army were
extralegal measures that were not sanctioned by the Constitution,
Vallandigham reasoned. The usurpation of power from the Congress
was unprecedented, and Vallandigham feared that the civil liberties
at the very heart of the republican ideal were therefore at risk. When
Congress was asked to validate the president’s actions, the Ohio
congressman vowed, “I will not vote to sustain or ratify—never.”
Vallandigham promised that he would vote “millions for defense, not
a dollar or a man for aggressive and offensive civil war.” The line
between dissent and treason is often blurry in wartime. Vallandigham
was walking a political and legal tightrope.
²

Lincoln took a personal interest in ending the congressional career
of
Clement L. Vallandigham.
Brigadier General Robert C. Schenck
was also a Dayton resident, former Whig congressman, and a
life-long friend of Anderson. The day after Anderson arrived from his
Texas escape, Schenck wrote the president, suggesting that he give
Anderson an equivalent commission. Wounded at the Second Battle
of Bull Run on the last day of August 1862, Schenck was recuperating
at Willard’s Hotel in Washington City when
Edwin M. Stanton and
Salmon P. Chase paid him a visit. “You are the only man who can
beat that traitor Vallandigham,” Chase pleaded. When Lincoln also
visited and suggested that Schenck could do his country a greater
service at the ballot box than on the battlefield, Schenck agreed to
run.
³

The war had lasted beyond most people’s worst dreams by the fall
of 1862. Morale in the North and the West ebbed as the body count
piled up with no final Union victory in sight. Not only had
Braxton
Bragg forced Don Carlos Buell all the way back from Alabama to
Louisville, but the rebels had installed a secessionist governor in
Kentucky. Vallandigham’s star was again on the ascent as the Lincoln
administration took a battering in the Democratic press. A
recession stoked the race-baiting techniques so commonly used by western
Democrats during the previous thirty years. “If the laboring men of
this state do not desire their places occupied by Negroes,” the editor
of the
Cincinnati Enquirer
wrote on August 4, “they will vote for the
nominees of the Democratic ticket.” Vallandigham acolyte
Thomas
O. Lowe was even cruder. “The Constitution as it is, the Union as
it was,
and the Niggers where they are
,” he wrote. The threat of a
tide of cheap labor released by a future emancipation of slaves
combined with war weariness to create distrust of the Lincoln
administration. Dissenters, many of whom were recent Irish immigrants,
also resented what they saw as moral condescension on the part of
New England Puritan abolitionists and temperance crusaders. They
formed the base of an informal protest group that became known as
Copperheads, and Vallandigham became their political champion.

The Republican press was just as yellow as its rivals. Scurrilous
rumors about Vallandigham’s supposed “treasonable plots”
circulated widely in newspapers and pamphlets. Just weeks before the
election, Lincoln played the war hero card by extolling
Schenck’s
bravery at Second Bull Run and promoting him to major general.
Vallandigham lost in a rout, but Democrats throughout the Western
states gained strength, winning fourteen of Ohio’s nineteen
congressional seats. Anderson’s troops rejoiced when they heard the news
of Vallandigham’s defeat. A straw poll of the regiment gave Schenck
in excess of four hundred votes, while Vallandigham garnered fewer
than a hundred. Vallandigham was not discouraged. He attributed
the defeat to political shenanigans. The setback only made him more
determined to get his message out and stop what he felt was a
horrible mistake of a war. He could think of no better podium than the
governor’s chair.
⁴

In March 1863, Vallandigham went public with his desire to run
for chief executive of his native state, an office then occupied by
David Tod. Custom dictated that the nomination be given to
Hugh J.
Jewett, who had run unsuccessfully against Tod in the last
gubernatorial contest. When Vallandigham sought the support of party
leaders that spring, he was rebuffed. No matter, he told his friends, the
people would support him. He published a collection of his former
speeches in a campaign manifesto titled
The Record of Hon. C. L.
Vallandigham on Abolition, the Union, and the Civil War
. Anderson,
another influential man without current employment, was one of
Vallandigham’s avid readers.

What Anderson read made him both angry and concerned.
Vallandigham’s epistle promised to explain “why negrophilistic fanaticism
includes  .  .  .  an intense hatred of Vallandigham.” The author
repeated his claim that the North was the sole aggressor in the conflict.
Vallandigham reasoned that the slavery question, a purely political
issue in the South, had motivated moral and religious zealots in the
North to overstep their bounds. Slavery was the South’s problem to
deal with. This was the same state sovereignty argument asserted by
many Southerners. Vallandigham professed a “serene indifference”
to the peculiar institution. The most important object, he preached,
was to return the Union and the Constitution to where it was prior to
the rebellion. Vallandigham’s conservative verbiage at the beginning
of his tome eventually gave way to radical proposals to reform the
Union into a confederation of three coequal sections.

Vallandigham reprinted a speech he gave in Congress in February
1861 titled “How Shall the Union Be Preserved?” In it, he proposed
that any measure introduced in the U.S. Senate require the
concurrence of a majority of the senators from each section: North, South,
and West. He further recommended that the president and vice
president be elected to six-year terms by a concurrent majority of state
electors or by a special election if no popular majority was reached,
as had been the case in 1860. In January 1863, Vallandigham
predicted that, in the case of permanent disunion, “the whole
NorthWest will go with the South,” citing evidence of “political revolution”
in the fall 1862 elections. “The day which divides the North from the
South,” Vallandigham argued, “the self-same day decrees the eternal
divorce between the West and the East.” This was hardly the talk of
the conservative Union man whom Val had professed to be. This was
the naked ambition of a man who viewed the Ohio governor’s race as
just another stepping-stone to a much greater destiny. Someone had
to stop him.
⁵