THE PRESIDENT VS. THE OHIO DEMOCRACY. age desertions from the army; and to leave, the Rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it. He was not arrested because he was damaging the political prospects of the Administration, or the personal interests of the commanding General, but because he was damaging the army, upon the existence and vigor of which the life of the nation depends. He was warring upon the military; and this gave the military constitutional jurisdiction to lay hands upon him. If Mr. Vallandigham was not damaging the military power of the country, then his arrest was made on mistake of fact, which I would be glad to correct on reasonably satisfactory evidence. "I understand the meeting, whose resolutions I am considering, to be in favor of suppressing the Rebellion by military force -by armies. Long experience has shown that armies cannot be maintained unless desertions shall be punished by the severe penalty of death. The case requires, and the law and the Constitution sanction, this punishment. Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked Ad ministration of a contemptible Government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that, in such a case, to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional but withal a great merev. If I be wrong on this question of con stitutional power, my error lies in believing that certain proceedings are constitutional when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety requires them, which would not be constitutional when, in the absence of rebellion or invasion, the public safety does not require them: in other words, that the Constitution is not, in its application, in all respects the same, in cases of rebellion or invasion involving the public safety, as it is in times of profound peace and public security. The Constitution itself makes the distinction; and I can no more be per suaded that the Government can constitutionally take no strong measures in time of rebellion, because it can be shown that the same could not be lawfully taken in time of peace, than I can be persuaded that a particular drug is not good medicine for a sick man. because it can be shown not to be good food for a well one. Nor am I able to appreciate the danger apprehended by the 30 June 11. 493 meeting, that the American people will, by means of military arrests during the Rebellion, lose the right of public discussion, the liberty of speech and the press, the law of evidence, trial by jury, and habeas corpus, throughout the indefinite peaceful future, which I trust lies before then, any more than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during a temporary illness as to persist in feeding upon them during the remainder of his healthiful life. * * * "One of the resolutions expresses the opinion of the meeting that arbitrary arrests will have the effect to divide and distract those who should be united in suppressing the Rebellion; and I am specifically called on to discharge Mr. Vallandigham. I regard this as, at least, a fair appeal to me on the expediency of exercising a constitutional power which I think exists. In response to such appeal, I have to say, it gave me pain when I learned that Mr. Vallandigham had been arrested-that is, I was pained that there should have seemed to be a necessity for arresting him-and that it will afford me great pleasure to discharge him so soon as I can, by any means, believe the public safety will not suffer by it." The Ohio Democratic Convention, which met " at Columbus, and by acclamation nominated Mr. Vallandigham as their candidate for Governor, passed resolves strongly condemning his banishment as a palpable violation of four specified provisions of the Federal Constitution, and appointed their President and VicePresidents (nearly all Members or exx-Members of Congress) a Committee to address the President in favor of a revocation of the order of banishment. In obeying this direction, that Committee, claiming to utter the sentiments of a majority of the people of Ohio, said: 31 “Mr. Vallandigham may differ with the President, and even with some of his own political party,as to the true and most ef fectual means of maintaining the Constitution and restoring the Union; but this difference of opinion does not prove him to be unfaithful to his duties as an American citizen. If a man, devotedly attached to 31 June 26. the Constitution and the Union, conscientiously believes that, from the inherent nature of the Federal compact, the war, in the present condition of things in this country, cannot be used as a means of restoring the Union; or that a war to subjugate a part of the States, or a war to revolutionize the social system in a part of the States, could not restore, but would inevitably result in the final destruction of, both the Constitution and the Union, is he not to be allowed the right of an American citizen to appeal to the judgment of the people for a change of policy by the constitutional remedy of the ballot-box? "The undersigned are unable to agree with you in the opinion you have expressed, that the Constitution is different in time of insurrection or invasion from what it is in time of peace and public security. The Constitution provides for no limitation upon or exceptions to the guaranties of personal liberty, except as to the writ of habeas corpus. Has the President, at the time of invasion or insurrection, the right to engraft limitations or exceptions upon these constitutional guaranties whenever, in his judgment, the public safety requires it? "True it is, the article of the Constitution which defines the various powers delegated to Congress declares that 'the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.' But this qualification or limitation upon this restriction upon the powers of Congress has no reference to or connection with the other constitutional guaranties of personal liberty. Expunge from the Constitution this limitation upon the power of Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and yet the other guaranties of personal liberty would remain unchanged." Mr. Lincoln responded" pungently to this appeal, but less elaborately than he had done to the Albany arraignment; deeming the argument in good part exhausted. On the main point, he said: "The earnestness with which you insist that persons can only, in times of rebellion, be lawfully dealt with, in accordance with the rules for criminal trials and punishments in times of peace, induces me to add a word to what I said on that point in the Albany response. You claim that men may, if they choose, embarrass those whose duty it is to combat a giant rebellion, and then be dealt with only in turn as if there were no 32 rebellion. The Constitution itself rejects this view. The military arrests and detentions which have been made, including those of Mr. Vallandigham, which are not different in principle from the other, have been for prevention, and not for punishment—as injunctions to stay injury, as proceedings to keep the peace-and hence, like proceedings in such cases and for like reasons, they have not been accompanied with indictments, or trials by juries, nor, in a single case, by any punishment whatever, beyond what is purely incidental to the prevention. The original sentence of imprisonment in Mr. Vallandigham's case was to prevent injury to the military service only; and the modification of it was made as a less disagreeable mode to him of securing the same prevention." In drawing his argument to a close, the President said: "You omit to state or intimate that, in your opinion, an army is a constitutional means of saving the Union against a rebellion, or even to intimate that you are conscious of an existing rebellion being in progress with the avowed object of destroying that very Union. At the same time, your nominee for Governor, in whose behalf you appeal, is known to you and to the world to declare against the use of an army to suppress the Rebellion. Your own attitude, therefore, encourages desertion, resistance to the draft, and the like; because it teaches those who incline to desert and to escape the draft to believe it is your purpose to protect them, and to hope that you will become strong enough to do so. After a short personal intercourse with you, gentlemen of the committee, I cannot say I think you desire this effect to follow your attitude; but I assure you that both friends and enemies of the Union look upon it in this light. It is a substantial hope, and by consequence a real strength, to the enemy. It is a false hope, and one which you would willingly dispel. I will make the way exceedingly easy. I send you duplicates of this letter, in order that you, or a majority, may, if you choose, indorse your names upon one of them, and return it thus indorsed to me, with the understanding that those signing are thereby committed to the following propositions, and to nothing else: "1. That there is now a rebellion in the United States, the object and tendency of which is, to destroy the National Union; and that, in your opinion, an army and navy are constitutional means for suppressing that rebellion. * June 29. THE JOURNALISTS ON LIBERTY OF THE PRESS. "2. That no one of you will do any thing which, in his own judgment, will tend to hinder the increase or favor the decrease or lessen the efficiency of the army and navy, while engaged in the effort to suppress that rebellion; and "3. That each of you will, in his sphere, do all he can to have the officers, soldiers, and seamen of the army and navy, while engaged in the effort to suppress the Rebellion, paid, fed, clad, and otherwise well provided for and supported. "And with the further understanding that, upon receiving the letter and names thus indorsed, I will cause them to be published; which publication shall be, within itself, a revocation of the order in relation to Mr. Vallandigham. 495 tions, or resistance to the draft; suggesting that "The measures of the Administration, and its changes of policy in the prosecution of the war, have been the fruitful sources of discouraging enlistments and inducing desertions, and furnish a reason for the undeniable fact that the first call for volunteers was answered by very many more than were demanded, and that the next call for soldiers will probably be responded to by drafted men alone." contracts, or conditions, with the President of the United States, to procure the release of Mr. Vallandigham. They express surprise at the President's proffer to revoke the banishment of Mr. V. on the conditions "It will not escape observation that I above specified, and decline to consent to the release of Mr. Vallandigham" enter into any bargains, terms, upon terms not embracing any pledge from him, or from others, as to what he will or will not do. I do this because he is not present to speak for himself, or to authorize others to speak for him; and hence I shall expect that on returning he would not put himself practically in antagonism with his friends. But I do it chiefly because I thereby prevail on other influential gentlemen of Ohio to so define their position as to be of immense value to the army-thus more than compensating for the consequences of any mistake in allowing Mr. Vallandigham to return; so that, on the whole, the public safety will not have suffered by it. Still, in regard to Mr. Vallandigham and all others, I must hereafter, as heretofore, do so much as the public service may seem to require. "I have the honor to be, respectfully, yours, &c., A. LINCOLN." They regard the proffer as involving an imputation on their own sincerity and fidelity as citizens of the United States ;" and declare that "they have asked the revocation of the order of banishment not as a favor, but as a right due to the people of Ohio, and with a view to avoid the possibility of conflict or disturbance of the public tranquillity." At this point, the argument of this grave question, concerning the right, in time of war, of those who question the justice or the policy of such war, to denounce its prosecution as mistaken and ruinous, was rested by the President and his assailants-or rather, it was transferred" by the and duties of the Press, in a season of convulsion and public peril, like the present, are briefly summed up in the following propositions: ity to the Constitution, Government, and laws "1. We recognize and affirm the duty of fidelof our country, as a high moral as well as political obligation resting on every citizen; and neither claim for ourselves nor concede to others any exemption from its requirements or privilege to evade their sacred and binding force. 2. That Treason and Rebellion are crimes, by the fundamental law of this as of every other country; and nowhere else so culpable, so abhorrent, as in a republic, where each has an equal voice and vote in the peaceful and legal direction of public affairs. "3. While we thus emphatically disclaim and latter to the popular forum, where- siastic thousands, though the speak especially in Ohio-it was continued with decided frankness as well as remarkable pertinacity and vehemence. And one natural consequence of such discussion was to render the Democratic party more decidedly, openly, palpably, anti-War than it had hither to been. Perhaps the very darkest days that the Republic ever saw were the ten which just preceded the 4th of July, 1863-when our oft-beaten Army of the Potomac was moving northward to cover Washington and Baltimore -when Milroy's demolition at Winchester seemed to have filled the bitter cup held to our lips at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville-when tidings of the displacement of Hooker by Meade, just on the eve of a great, decisive battle, were received with a painful surprise by many sad, sinking hearts-when Grant was held at bay by Vicksburg and Banks by Port Hudson; while Rosecrans had for half a year stood still in Middle Tennessee. At this hour of national peril and depression, when the early appearance of Lee's crowned legions in the streets of Philadelphia and New York was confidently, exultingly anticipated by thousands, our leading Democratic statesmen and orators were preparing orations and addresses for the approaching anniversary of our National Independence, which were in due time delivered to applauding, enthu ers were generally as chary as the Ohio Democratic State Committee of admitting the existence in our country of a gigantic Rebellion, and insisting on the duty of aiding in its suppression. Not the Rebel chiefs conspiring, nor the Rebel armies advancing at their behest, to overthrow the Government and sever finally the Union, but the directors and chief functionaries of that Government, were regarded and reprobated by those orators as public enemies to be combated, resisted, and overcome. Ex-President Franklin Pierce" was the orator at a great Democratic mass meeting held at Concord, N. H.; and, in his carefully prepared oration,amid the ringing acclaim of thousands, he said: "The Declaration of Independence laid the two fundamental ideas of the absolute the foundation of our political greatness in independence of the American people, and of the sovereignty of their respective States. forefathers fought the battle of the Revolu Under that standard, our wise and heroic tion; under that, they conquered. In this spirit, they established the Union; having the conservative thought ever present to their minds, of the origin: 1 sovereignty and victory-independence of the several States, all with deny any right, as inhering in journalists or others, to incite, advocate, abet, uphold, or justify treason or rebellion, we respectfully but firmly assert and maintain the right of the Press to criticise freely and fearlessly the acts of those charged with the administration of the government, also those of all their civil and military subordinates, whether with intent directly to secure greater energy, efficiency, and fidelity in the public service, or in order to achieve the and habits, to be maintained intact and setheir diverse institutions, interests, opinions, cure, by the reciprocal stipulations and mnttual compromises of the Constitution. They were master builders, who reared up the grand structure of the Union-that august temple beneath whose dome three generaliberty as were never before vouchsafed by tions have enjoyed such blessings of civil Providence to man-that temple before whose altars you and I have not only bowed with devout and grateful hearts, but where, with patriotic vows and sacrifices, we have same ends more remotely, through the substitution of other persons for those now in power. "4. That any limitations of this right created by the necessities of war should be confined to localities wherein hostilities actually exist, or are imminently threatened; and we deny the right of any military officer to suppress the is sues or forbid the general circulation of journals printed hundreds of miles from the seat of war." 35 See his letter to Jeff. Davis, Vol. I., p. 512. FRANKLIN PIERCE ON THE WAR AND ITS CAUSES. 497 so frequently consecrated ourselves to the protection and maintenance of those lofty columns of the Constitution by which it was upheld. No visionary enthusiasts were they, dreaming vainly of the impossible uniformity of some wild Utopia of their own imaginations. No desperate reformers were they, madly bent upon schemes which, if consummated, could only result in general confusion, anarchy, and chaos. Oh, no! high-erly love, into insensate beings, savagely hearted, but sagacious and practical statesmen they were, who saw society as a living fact, not as a troubled vision; who knew that national power consists in the reconcileinent of diversities of institutions and terests, not their conflict and obliteration; and who saw that variety and adaptation of parts are the necessary elements of all there is sublime or beautiful in the works of art or of nature. Majestic were the solid foundations, the massive masonry, the columned loftiness, of that magnificent structure of the Union. Glorious was the career of prosperity and peace and power upon which, from its very birthday, the American Union entered, as with the assured march of the conscious offspring of those giants of the Revolution. Such was the Union, as conceived and administered by Washington and Adams, by Jefferson and Madison and Jackson. Such, I say, was the Union, ere the evil times befell us; ere the madness of sectional hatreds and animosities possessed us; ere, in the third generation, the all-comprehensive patriotism of the Fathers had died out, and given place to the passionate emotions of narrow and aggressive sectionalism. * * * Glorious, sublime above all that history records of national greatness, was the spectacle which the Union exhibited to the world, so long as the true spirit of the Constitution lived in the hearts of the people, and the government was a government of men recip-dling of too many of the citizens of the rocally respecting one another's rights, and of States, each moving, planet-like, in the orbit of its proper place in the firmament of the Union. Then we were the model republic of the world, honored, loved, or feared where we were not loved, respected abroad, peaceful and happy at home. No American citizen was then subject to be driven into exile for opinion's sake, or arbitrarily arrested and incarcerated in military bastiles -even as he may now be-not for acts or words of imputed treason, but if he do but mourn in silent sorrow over the desolation of his country; no embattled hosts of Americans were then wasting their lives and resources in sanguinary civil strife; no suicidal and parricidal civil war then swept like a raging tempest of death over the stricken homesteads and wailing cities of the Union. Oh, that such a change should have come over our country, in a day, as it were-as if all VOL. II.-32 men in every State of the Union, North and South, East and West, were sullenly smitten with homicidal madness, and the custom of fell deeds' rendered as familiar as if it were a part of our inborn nature; as if an avenging angel had been suffered by Providence to wave a sword of flaming fire above our heads, to convert so many millions of good men, living together in broth bent on the destruction of themselves and of each other, and leaving but a smouldering ruin of conflagration and of blood in the place of our once blesséd Union. I endeavor in-sometimes to close my ears to the sounds and my eyes to the sights of woe, and to ask myself whether all this can be-to inquire which is true, whether the past happiness and prosperity of iny country are but the flattering vision of a happy sleep, or its present misery and desolation haply the delusion of some disturbed dream. One or the other seems incredible and impossible: but, alas! the stern truth can not thus be dispelled from our minds. Can you forget, ought I especially to be expected to forget, those not remote days in the history of our country, when its greatness and glory shed the reflection at least of their rays upon all our lives, and thus enabled us to read the lessons of the fathers, and of their Constitution, in the light of their principles and their deeds? Then war was conducted only against the foreign enemy, and not in the spirit and purpose of persecuting non-combatant populations, nor of burning undefended towns or private dwellings, and wasting the fields of the husbandmen, or the workshops of the artisan, but of subduing armed hosts in the field. *** How is all this changed! And why? Do we not all know that the cause of our calamities is the vicious intermed Northern States with the constitutional rights of the Southern States, cooperating with the discontents of the people of those States? Do we not know that the disregard of the Constitution, and of the security it affords to the rights of States and of individuals, has been the cause of the calamity which our country is called to undergo? And now, war! war, in its direst shapewar, such as it makes the blood run cold to read of in the history of other nations and of other times-war, on a scale of a million of men in arms-war, horrid as that of barbaric ages, rages in several of the States of the Union, as its more immediate field, and casts the lurid shadow of its death and lamentation athwart the whole expanse, anl into every nook and corner of our vast domain. Nor is that all; for in those of the States which are exempt from the actual ravages of war, in which the roar of the |