CHAPTER XXII. FREEDOM'S SUN STILL RISING. DEFINITE CONGRESSIONAL ACTION, ON EMANCIPATION, GERMINATING -GLORIOUS NEWS FROM THE WEST AND EAST-FALL OF VICKSBURG-GETTYSBURG—LINCOLN'S GETTYSBURG ORATION-THE DRAFT THE REBEL FIRE IN THE REAR"-DRAFT RIOTS IN NEW YORK-LINCOLN'S LETTER, AUGUST, 1863, ON THE SITUATION-CHATTANOOGA THE CHEERING FALL-ELECTIONS-VAL 66 66 LANDIGHAM'S DEFEAT-EMANCIPATION AS A POLITICAL" A FTER President Lincoln had issued his Proclamation of Emancipation, the friends of Freedom clearly perceived-and none of them more clearly than himselfthat until the incorporation of that great Act into the Constitution of the United States itself, there could be no real assurance of safety to the liberties of the emancipated; that unless this were done there would be left, even after the suppression of the Rebellion, a living spark of dissension which might at any time again be fanned into the flames of Civil War. Hence, at all proper times, Mr. Lincoln favored and even urged Congressional action upon the subject. It was not, however, until the following year that definite action may be said to have commenced in Congress toward that end; and, as Congress was slow, he found it necessary to say in his third Annual Message: "while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation; nor shall I return to Slavery any person who is Free by the terms of that Proclamation, or by any of the Acts of Congress. Meantime, however, occurred the series of glorious Union victories in the West, ending with the surrender to Grant's triumphant Forces on the 4th of July, 1863, of Vicksburg-"the Gibraltar of the West"-with its GarrisonArmy, and enormous quantities of arms and munitions of war; thus closing a brilliant and successful Campaign with a blow which literally "broke the back" of the Rebellion; while, almost simultaneously, July 1-3, the Union Forces of the East, under Meade, gained the great victory of Gettysburg, and, driving the hosts of Lee from Pennsylvania, put a second and final end to Rebel invasion of Northern soil; gaining it, on ground dedicated by President Lincoln, before that year had closed-as a place of sepulture for the Patriot-soldiers who there had fallenin a brief, touching and immortal Address, which every American child should learn by heart, and every American adult ponder deeply,* as embodying the very essence of true Republicanism. *President Lincoln's Address, when the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pa., was dedicated Nov. 19, 1863, was in these memorable words: "Fourscore and seven years ago, our Fathers brought forth upon this continent a new Nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. "Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that Nation, or any Nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. "We are met on a great battlefield of that War. We have come here to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that Nation might live. "It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. "But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. "The World will little note, nor long remember, what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here. "It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have, thus far, so nobly advanced. "It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that Cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of Freedom; and that Government of the People, by the People, and for the People, shall not perish from the Earth." That season of victory for the Union arms, coming, as it did, upon a season of depression and doubtfulness, was doubly grateful to the loyal heart of the Nation. Daylight seemed to be breaking at last. Gettysburg had hurled back the Southern invader from our soil; and Vicksburg, with the immediately resulting surrender of Port Hudson, had opened the Mississippi river from Cairo to the Gulf, and split the Confederacy in twain. But it happened just about this time that, the enrollment of the whole Militia of the United States (under the Act of March, 1863), having been completed, and a Draft for 300,000 men ordered to be made and executed, if by a subsequent time the quotas of the various States should not be filled by volunteering, certain malcontents and Copperheads, inspired by agents and other friends of the Southern Conspirators, started and fomented, in the city of New York, a spirit of unreasoning opposition both to voluntary enlistment, and conscription under the Draft, that finally culminated, July 13th, in a terrible Riot, lasting several days, during which that great metropolis was in the hands, and completely at the mercy, of a brutal mob of Secession sympathizers, who made day and night hideous with their drunken bellowings, terrorized everybody even suspected of love for the Union, plundered and burned dwellings, including a Colored Orphan Asylum, and added to the crime of arson, that of murdering the mob-chased, terrorstricken Negroes, by hanging them to the lamp-posts. These Riots constituted a part of that "Fire in the Rear" with which the Rebels and their Northern Democratic sympathizers had so frequently menaced the Armies of the Union. Alluding to them, the N. Y. Tribune on July 15th, while its office was invested and threatened with attack and demolition, bravely said: "They are, in purpose and in essence, a Diversion in favor of Jefferson Davis and Lee. Listen to the yells of the mob and the harangues of its favorite orators, and you will find them surcharged with 'Nigger,' 'Abolition,' 'Black Republican,' denunciation of prominent Republicans, The Tribune, etc. etc.—all very wide of the Draft and the exemption. Had the Abolitionists, instead of the Slaveholders, revolted, and undertaken to upset the Government and dissolve the Union, ninetenths of these rioters would have eagerly voluntered to put them down. It is the fear, stimulated by the recent and glorious triumphs of the Union Arms, that Slavery and the Rebellion must suffer, which is at the bottom of all this arson, devastation, robbery, and murder." The Democratic Governor, Seymour, by promising to "have this Draft suspended and stopped," did something toward quieting the Riots, but it was not until the Army of the Potomac, now following Lee's retreat, was weakened by the sending of several regiments to New York that the Draft-rioting spirit, in that city, and to a less extent in other cities, was thoroughly cowed. Worried and weakened by this Democratic opposition to the Draft, and the threatened consequent delays and dangers to the success of the Union Cause,* and depressed moreover by the defeat of the National forces under Rosecrans at Chickamauga; yet, the favorable determination of the Fall elections on the side of Union and Freedom, and the im *In reply to Gov. Seymour's appeal for delay in the execution of the Draft Law, in order to test its Constitutionality, Mr. Lincoln, on the 7th of August, said he could not consent to lose the time that would be involved in obtaining a decision from the U. S. Supreme Court on that point, and proceeded: "We are contending with an Enemy who, as I understand, drives every able-bodied man he can reach into his ranks, very much as a butcher drives bullocks into a slaughter-pen. No time is wasted, no argument is used. "This system produces an Army which will soon turn upon our now victorious soldiers already in the field, if they shall not be sustained by recruits as they should be. "It produces an Army with a rapidity not to be matched on our side, if we first waste time to re-experiment with the Volunteer system, already deemed by Congress, and palpably, in fact, so far exhausted as to be inadequate; and then more time to obtain a Court decision as to whether a law is Constitutional which requires a part of those not now in the Service to go to those who are already in it, and still more time to determine with absolute certainty that we get those who are to go, in the precisely legal proportion to those who are not to go. "My purpose is to be in my action Just and Constitutional, and yet Practical, in performing the important duty with which I am charged, of maintaining the Unity and the Free principles of our common Country." mense majorities upholding those issues, together with Grant's great victory (November, 1863) of Chattanoogawhere the three days of fighting in the Chattanooga Valley and up among the clouds of Lookout Mountain and Mission Ridge, not only effaced the memory of Rosecrans's previous disaster, but brought fresh and imperishable laurels to the Union Arms--stiffened the President's backbone, and that of Union men everywhere Not that Mr. Lincoln had shown any signs of weakness or wavering, or any loss of hope in the ultimate result of this War for the preservation of the Union-which now also involved Freedom to all beneath its banner. On the contrary, a letter of his written late in August* shows con * This admirable letter, reviewing "the situation" and his policy, was in these words: HON. JAMES C. CONKLING : EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, August 26, 1863. MY DEAR SIR; Your letter inviting me to attend a Mass Meeting of unconditional Union men, to be held at the Capital of Illinois, on the 3rd day of September, has been received. It would be very agreeable for me thus to meet my old friends at my own home; but I cannot just now be absent from here so long a time as a visit there would require. The meeting is to be of all those who maintain unconditional devotion to the Union; and I am sure that my old political friends will thank me for tendering, as I do, the Nation's gratitude to those other noble men whom no partisan malice or partisan hope can make false to the Nation's life. There are those who are dissatisfied with me. To such I would say: you desire Peace, and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it? There are but three conceivable ways: First, to suppress the Rebellion by force of Arms. This I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly. If you are not for Force, nor yet for Dissolution, there only remains some imaginable Compromise. I do not believe that any Compromise embracing the maintenance of the Union is now possible. All that I learn leads to a directly opposite belief. The strength of the Rebellion is its Military, its Army. That Army dominates all the Country, and all the people, within its range. Any offer of terms made by any man or men within that range, in opposition to that Army, is simply nothing for the present: because such man or men have no power whatever to enforce their side of a Compromise, if one were made with them. To illustrate: Suppose refugees from the South, and Peace men of the |
