336

a April, 1861.

THE PRESIDENT CALLS OUT THE MILITIA.

In a proclamation issued on the 15th," the President declared that the laws of the Republic had been for some time, and were then, opposed in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, "by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by law;" and he therefore, by virtue of the power in him vested by the Constitution and the laws, called forth the militia of the several States of the Union, to the aggregate number of seventy-five thousand, in order to suppress those combinations and to cause the laws to be duly executed. The President appealed to all loyal citizens to "favor, facilitate, and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government, and to redress wrongs already long enough endured." He deemed it proper to say, that the first service assigned to the forces thereby called forth would probably be "to repossess the forts, places, and property which had been seized from the Union ;" and he assured the people that in every event the utmost care would be observed, consistently with the objects stated, to

"avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens of any part of the country." He commanded the persons composing the combinations. mentioned to disperse, and retire peaceably to their respective abodes, within twenty days from the date of his proclamation.'

Impressed with the conviction that the then condition of public affairs demanded an extraordinary session of the Congress, he, in the same proclamation, summoned the Senators and Representatives to assemble at their respective chambers in Washington City, at noon on Thursday, the 4th day of July next ensuing, then and there to consider and determine such measures as, in their wisdom, the public safety might seem to demand.

SIMON CAMERON,

Simultaneously with the President's Proclamation, the Secretary of War, under the authority of an Act of Congress, approved in February, 1795, issued a telegraphic dispatch to the Governors of all the States of the Union, excepting those mentioned in the proclamation, requesting each of them to cause to be immediately detailed from the militia of his State the quota designated in a table, which he appended, to serve as infantry or riflemen for a period of three months (the extent allowed by law), unless sooner

Proclamation of President LINCOLN, April 15, 1861.

2 See The Military Laws of the United States: by John F. Callan, page 108. G. W. Childs, Philadelphia. 1863. The President's authority for the proclamation may be found in the second and third sections of the Act approved February 28, 1795.

2 The law declared that the militia should not be "compelled to serve more than three months after arrival

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 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. The 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.

The quota for each State was as follows. The figures denote the number of regiments.

2 Letter of Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, to the Governors of States, April 15, 1861.

VOL. I.-22

4

..13

6

6

1

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 commenced 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 here 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 c. 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. 813.

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, late 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:

2

"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

State; and assurances had come by scores from all parts of the "Confederacy," and of the Border Slave-labor States, that ample aid in men and money would be given to the "Southern cause.' And an adroit knave 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

labor 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.

3 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."