Vallandigham and Cox became leading Peace Democrats—Northerners who opposed Lincoln’s so-called “abolition war” and who called for a cessation of hostilities. Vallandigham coined the Copperhead catchphrase “To maintain the Constitution as it is, and to restore the Union as it was.”18 With their spurious version of American history, which traced an evil line from New England Puritanism to abolitionism and Republicanism, they exculpated the South for any responsibility for the war.
Lincoln set out to demolish this twisted reasoning.
Vallandigham was arrested on March 5, 1863, after giving an anti-administration speech at a Democratic rally in Mount Vernon, Ohio. He was taken into custody under Ambrose Burnside’s General Order No. 38, which demanded the arrest of anyone in the Ohio Military District who habitually expressed sympathy with the enemy—what Burnside called “treason, expressed or implied.”19 At the rally, Vallandigham had said that he “spat upon” Burnside’s order “trampled it under his feet.”20 He denounced the “injurious, cruel, and unnecessary war,—a war for the purpose of crushing out liberty, and establishing despotism,—a war for the freedom of the blacks and the enslaving of the whites.” He said that his purpose was “to defeat an attempt to build up a monarchy on the ruins of our free government; that he believed the men in power were trying to establish a despotism.”21
A military tribunal condemned Vallandigham to prison for the remainder of the war, but Lincoln commuted the sentence to exile to the Confederacy. Protests against Vallandigham’s punishment broke out in many cities. Democrats portrayed Vallandigham as the victim of a tyrannical suppression of free speech. They tarred Lincoln with epithets like “dictator,” “flatboat tyrant,” “Caesar,” and so on.22 Although Lincoln had disagreed with Burnside’s arrest of Vallandigham, he seized the opportunity to make a point about civil liberties and the war. Even before the incident, he had been preparing an explanation of his suspension of habeas corpus. Now was his moment to publicize it.
He took Anna Ella Carroll’s approach. The South, not the North, had violated the Constitution. The South’s disruption of the US government made necessary a suspension of certain constitutional rights. History validated the suspension of habeas corpus during wartime. The suspension was just a temporary emergency measure.
Lincoln made these points forcefully in his June 16 letter to Erastus Corning, the leader of a group of Albany, New York, Democrats who issued a resolution against the president. In his carefully worded reply, Lincoln agreed with Corning in his insistence on adhering to the Constitution. Corning in his letter had brought up the English civil wars of the 1640s, reminding Lincoln that the rights that the Puritans had fought for had also been pursued during the American Revolution. Lincoln countered by saying that the rights that the British and American revolutionaries had battled for came after, not during the wars. Lincoln wrote, “I too am devotedly for them after civil war, and before civil war, and at all times ‘except when, in cases of Rebellion or Invasion, the public Safety may require’ their suspension.”23 Cromwell and Washington had every right to defy statutes when necessary during wartime, just as Lincoln had to suspend certain laws during the Civil War.
These were concise renderings of points Anne Carroll had made, as were Lincoln’s assurances about the temporary nature of his emergency measures. In her pamphlet on The War Powers of the President, Carroll wrote, “While the war continues the President must conduct [law enforcement] by
the instrumentality of the military force, but when the war ceases, upon having accomplished its end, then ipso facto the functions of the war power cease and those of the judiciary are replaced in complete authority.”24
Lincoln enlivened this argument through a striking metaphor drawn from medical culture. Many drugs in that era of heroic medicine were emetics. Like another favorite treatment, bloodletting—by which a vein was sliced or leeches were applied to draw out supposedly tainted blood—emetics like antimony and potassium tartrate were thought to expel bad liquids from the body. Lincoln compared his wartime suspension of constitutional rights to such disagreeable treatments. He said he could not believe Americans would expect to lose rights like habeas corpus, due process, and the freedom of speech and press “throughout the indefinite peaceful future which I trust lies before them, any more than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life.”25
Like Carroll, Lincoln cited the historical example of Andrew Jackson’s suspension of habeas corpus after the Battle of New Orleans. Lincoln’s most memorable statement, however, drove home the malicious influence of antigovernment activism like Vallandigham’s. Lincoln asked rhetorically, “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley [sic] agitator who induces him to desert?”26
By enlivening Carroll’s arguments with pungent images, Lincoln snatched victory from apparent defeat. Many newspapers printed Lincoln’s Corning letter, which was also widely distributed in pamphlet form. Republican politicians heaped praise on Lincoln, calling the letter “one of your best State Papers,” “the best Campaign document we can have,” “another Ten Strike. Full of points, . . . and all unanswerable,” “complete and triumphant— . . . You have ‘hit the nail on the head.’
It didn’t hurt Lincoln’s image that in the midst of the Vallandigham brouhaha he intervened judiciously in two civil liberties cases: he revoked an order by General Burnside that had shuttered a hostile newspaper, the Chicago Times; and he had persuaded Burnside to reverse the guilty verdict reached by a military court against Indiana politician Alexander J. Douglas, who had made disloyal comments in a speech.28
What, then, is the scorecard on Lincoln and civil liberties? Mark E. Neely Jr. argues persuasively that we should be sympathetic to the president in this regard. Neely concedes that the actions Lincoln took in the late summer and early fall of 1862 constituted the “lowest point for civil liberties in the North during the Civil War . . . and one of the lowest for civil liberties of all time in United States history.”29 But as Neely points out, most of the arrests took place in the politically ambiguous border states and involved matters such as smuggling, fraud, and running blockades. Also, Neely reminds us, Lincoln took exceptional care when adjudicating the fate of 303 Sioux Indians who were sentenced to death for slaughtering white settlers in Minnesota.30 Lincoln sifted through trial records and, carefully weighing the evidence in each case, winnowed the number to be executed to thirty-nine. He also had a well-known tendency to pardon soldiers who had done wrong. His basic instincts were for mercy and fairness, not undue punishment.
He could thank Anne Carroll for supporting his position on the Constitution with her well-reasoned, history-based pamphlets. He could also thank her for the contributions she made to the Tennessee River campaign, which proved crucial to the Union cause.
THE TENNESSEE RIVER CAMPAIGN: “NOT ONLY A CIVILIAN BUT A WOMAN?”
In the fall of 1861, prospects for the Union military forces were bleak. Defeats at Bull Run, Big Bethel, Ball’s Bluff, Lexington, and Wilson’s Creek had shattered expectations of a short, easy war. In the East, General George McClellan was training troops skillfully, but he made no aggressive military moves; his tentativeness, caused by his chronic overestimation of enemy troop size, would continue to hobble him as a battlefield commander. In the West, General John Frémont, in the wake of Lincoln’s revocation of his proclamation of emancipation in Missouri, was on a futile chase of Confederate troops that led to his removal from command on November 3. The Union had vague plans to advance down the Mississippi River from St. Louis and destroy the Confederate forts that controlled the river. Taking the Mississippi was a part of the so-called Anaconda Plan, devised by the aged, corpulent general Winfield Scott, who called for encircling the Confederacy on oceans and rivers.
A fleet of seven innovative gunboats was being built for the Union’s river campaign. Designed by the famous St. Louis engineer James B. Eads, the slope-sided boats were called mud turtles or Pook Turtles (after Samuel Pook, the contractor who built them). Flat-bottomed paddle wheelers, the boats were formidable. Each was 175 feet long and 51 feet wide and carried thirteen large-caliber guns. Four of the boats were the first ironclads built in the United States; the other three were of wood.
The problem, as Anne Carroll saw it, was advancing down the heavily fortified Mississippi River from St. Louis. In November 1861, she traveled to Missouri, stopping along the way to meet with Union troops and generals, including Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. In St. Louis, while staying at the Everett House, she studied topographical maps and concluded that descending the Mississippi was inadvisable, because the river was shallow in some places and its current ran south. The heavy Pook Turtles were slow and could not move backward against a current. If crippled by enemy fire, they would float helplessly back into Confederate-held areas.
Anne thought about an alternate route of attack. She focused on the 652-mile Tennessee River, which flows from east Tennessee through Chattanooga and northern Alabama before running up through Tennessee and Kentucky, where it joins the Ohio River. She interrogated the pilot Charles M. Scott about the Tennessee River. A Southerner who had left the Confederacy and joined Brigadier General Grant as a pilot, Scott told her that he had often navigated the river and knew it to be of sufficient depth for the Pook Turtles. Anne decided that the Union force should not approach the rebel forts directly, on the Mississippi, but from the less-protected rear, by going up the Tennessee River and, where necessary, proceeding overland. This strategy would also allow for cutting the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, a main Confederate supply route. Anne envisaged a rapid move on to Vicksburg, the rebels’ major stronghold on the Mississippi, and a simultaneous attack on Mobile, Alabama, via the Gulf of Mexico, followed by moving north through Alabama on the Tombigbee and Alabama Rivers.
On November 12, Anne wrote about her plan to Attorney General Bates and Assistant Secretary of War Thomas A. Scott. She also sent a note to Lincoln. Soon she was back in Washington, where she composed a concise but comprehensive summary of the plan. “The civil and military authorities,” she wrote, “seem to be laboring under a great mistake in regard to the true key of the war in the Southwest. . . . Now all preparations in the West predicate that the Mississippi River is the point to which the authorities are directing their attention. . . . The Tennessee offers many advantages over the Mississippi.”31
She described these advantages so persuasively that the Ohio senator Benjamin Wade, a Radical Republican who headed a congressional committee on the war, took her summary immediately to Lincoln. The president was diffident. How would his military commanders respond to this proposal from someone who was “not only a civilian but a woman?” he asked. Wade exclaimed, “Hang, damn, and otherwise blankety-blank, blank, blank the military. If it is a good plan, let us have it!” Lincoln mulled over the plan for days. When Anne met him at a social function in mid-December, she asked if he had considered her plan. She later recalled his reply: “I have been able to think of nothing else.”
On January 14, 1862, Edwin Stanton replaced Simon Cameron as Lincoln’s secretary of war. Stanton believed in the Tennessee River strategy, and he helped set it in motion. By early February, Ulysses Grant had taken Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. The Pook Turtles destroyed Confederate shipping and railway bridges. The Tennessee was now open to the Union. Grant’s troops sloshed twelve miles east through mud to Fort Donelson, which they captured on the sixteenth. The long, grueling battle in wintry conditions earned the general his nickname, Unconditional Surrender Grant. His superior, General Henry Halleck, announced the next month that the Tennessee River “is now the great strategic line of the Western campaign.”32
Fort Donelson was followed by what the New York Times called “A Deluge of Victories” in the West. Between February and May 1862, as James M. McPherson notes, “Union forces conquered 50,000 square miles of territory, gained control of 1,000 miles of navigable rivers, captured two state capitals and the South’s largest city, and put 30,000 enemy soldiers out of action.”33 The South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut lamented, “Battle after battle has occurred, disaster after disaster. . . . Down into the very depths of despair are we. New Orleans gone—and with it the Confederacy. . . . [N]othing to chronicle but disaster.”34
Desperate times were ahead for the Union as well. Second Manassas, the Seven Days, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga, Cold Harbor—these and other Confederate victories caused the same kind of feelings among Northerners that Mary Chesnut experienced in 1862. There were moments when the South seemed poised to win the war.
But it is hard to envisage the Union’s ultimate triumph without the success of the Tennessee River campaign. As Anne Carroll wrote in April 1865, the campaign “made the opening of the Mississippi River possible, broke the Confederate power throughout its great valley, and opened the gate for the great Sherman [to advance] into the South Atlantic States, enabling him to cooperate with General Grant in the siege of Petersburg and Richmond, and leaving Davis without a country in which to create another army.
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