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rollment act, from a district of rich women which they would from a district with the same number of men of equal means. I assume that we are looking for personal military service from those able to perform it, that we make no calls for volunteers in the sense in which the commission understand it, but that we assign to the districts under the enrollment act fair quotas of the men we have found them to contain.

The President entirely agreed with the Provost-Marshal General that it was manifestly unjust to require as many drafted men from a district that had been depleted of its young men by the patriotic impulse which filled the army at the beginning of the war as were justly called for from one that had contributed nothing to the field, a course which would have been the logical result of yielding to the demands of Governor Seymour and the recommendation of the commission. But, wishing to make all possible concessions to the State authorities, he resolved once more to reduce the quota of New York, and explained his action in a letter to the Secretary of War dated February 27, 1864. So long as Governor Seymour remained in office he continued his warfare upon the enrollment act and the officers charged with its execution. On the 18th of July, 1864, the President made a third call for troops under the act, and the governor promptly renewed his charges and complaints. At this time, however, both he and Mr. Lincoln were candidates before the people - the one for the Presidency, and the other for the Governorship of New York; and it was probably for this reason that Mr. Seymour's correspondence was carried on at this time with the Secretary of War instead of Mr. Lincoln. But it afforded no new features; there were the same complaints of excessive quotas, of unfair, unequal, and oppressive action, as before. He said again that there had been no opportunity given to correct the enrollment, upon which the Provost-Marshal General reported that the governor had been duly informed of the opportunities to make corrections, and that an order had been issued from his own headquarters in reference to the matter. No efforts were spared by the Government to insure a rigid revision of the lists. The governor spoke with great vehemence of the disparity between the demand made upon New York and Boston, saying that in one of the cities 26 per cent. of the population was enrolled, and in the other only 122 per cent. General Fry replied to this that the proportion of enrollment to population in Boston was not 121⁄2 but 16.92 per cent. ; that less than 17 per cent. in New York and Brooklyn were enrolled, and that, in fine, the enrollment was a mere question of fact—it was the ascertainment of the number of men of a certain de

scription in defined areas; that the enrollments were continuously open to revision, and that any name erroneously on them would be stricken off as soon as the error was pointed out by anybody to the Board of Enrollment. He then showed that the quotas throughout New York were in fact smaller than in many other States where the proportion of men was large, and closed his report by saying that he "saw no reason why the law should not be applied to New York as well as to other States." This report Mr. Stanton 1 transmitted to the governor, expressing the somewhat sanguine trust that it would satisfy him that his objections against the quotas assigned to New York were not well founded. He recalled the fact that a commission had been appointed the year before with a view to ascertain whether any mistake or errors had been made by the enrolling officers, but that the commissioners bore their testimony to the fidelity with which the work was done; that with a view to harmony the President had directed a reduction in some districts, but without the increase of others recommended by the commissioners; and that a basis for the assignment being now absolutely fixed by act of Congress, the War Department had no power to change it.

The voters of New York in the autumn election decided to retire Governor Seymour to private life, and his successor, Governor Fenton, gave to the Government, during the rest of the war, a hearty and loyal support.

While the controversy between the Government and its opponents in regard to the enrollment and the draft was going on, the President, disappointed and grieved at the persistent misrepresentations of his views and his intentions by those of whom he had expected better things, and feeling that he was unable, by any power of logic or persuasion, to induce the leaders of the Democratic party to do him justice or to coöperate with him in the measures which he was convinced were for the public good, thought for a time of appealing directly to the people of the United States in defense of the conduct of the Government. He prepared a long and elaborate address, which he intended more especially for the consideration of the honest and patriotic Democrats of the North, setting forth, with his inimitable clearness of statement, the necessity for the draft, the substantial fairness of the provisions of the law, and the honesty and equity with which, as he claimed, the Government had attempted to carry it out. But, after he had finished it, doubts arose in his mind as to the propriety or the expediency of addressing the public directly in that manner, and it was never published. It is here, for the first time, printed, from Mr. Lincoln's own manuscript, and it is 1 Aug. 11, 1864.

a question whether the reader will more admire the lucidity and the fairness with which the President sets forth his views, or the reserve and abnegation with which, after writing it, he resolved to suppress so admirable a paper:

"It is at all times proper that misunderstand ing between the public and the public servant should be avoided; and this is far more important now than in times of peace and tranquillity. I therefore address you without searching for a precedent upon which to do so. Some of you are sincerely devoted to the republican institutions and territorial integrity of our country, and yet are opposed to what is called the draft, or conscription.

"At the beginning of the war, and ever since, a variety of motives, pressing, some in one direction and some in the other, would be presented to the mind of each man physically fit for a soldier, upon the combined effect of which motives he would, or would not, voluntarily enter the service. Among these motives would be patriotism, political bias, ambition, personal courage, love of adventure, want of employment, and convenience, or the opposite of some of these. We already have, and have had in the service, as appears, substantially all that can be obtained upon this voluntary weighing of motives. And yet we must somehow obtain more, or relinquish the original object of the contest, together with all the blood and treasure already expended in the effort to secure it. To meet this necessity the law for the draft has been enacted. You who do not wish to be soldiers do not like this law. This is natural; nor does it imply want of patriotism. Nothing can be so just and necessary as to make us like it if it is disagreeable to us. We are prone, too, to find false arguments with which to excuse ourselves for opposing such disagreeable things. In this case, those who desire the rebellion to succeed, and others who seek reward in a different way, are very active in accommodating us with this class of argument. They tell us the law is unconstitutional. It is the first instance, I believe, in which the power of Congress to do a thing has ever been questioned in a case when the power is given by the Constitution in express terms. Whether a power can be implied, when it is not expressed, has often been the subject of controversy; but this is the first case in which the degree of effrontery has been ventured upon, of denying a power which is plainly and distinctly written down in the Constitution. The Constitution declares that the Congress shall have power. . . to raise and support armies; but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.' The whole scope of the conscription act is 'to

raise and support armies.' There is nothing else in it. It makes no appropriation of money, and hence the money clause just quoted is not touched by it. The case simply is, the Constitution provides that the Congress shall have power to raise and support armies; and by this act the Congress has exercised the power to raise and support armies. This is the whole of it. It is a law made in literal pursuance of this part of the United States Constitution; and another part of the same Constitution declares that this Constitution, and the laws made in pursuance thereof, . . . shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.' Do you admit that the power is given to raise and support armies, and yet insist that by this act Congress has not exercised the power in a constitutional mode? has not done the thing in the right way? Who is to judge of this? The Constitution gives Congress the power, but it does not prescribe the mode, or expressly declare who shall prescribe it. In such case Congress must prescribe the mode, or relinquish the power. There is no alternative. Congress could not exercise the power to do the thing if it had not the power of providing a way to do it, when no way is provided by the Constitution for doing it. In fact, Congress would not have the power to raise and support armies, if even by the Constitution it were left to the option of any other, or others, to give or withhold the only mode of doing it. If the Constitution has prescribed a mode, Congress could and must follow that mode; but, as it is, the mode necessarily goes to Congress, with the power expressly given. The power is given fully, completely, unconditionally. It is not a power to raise armies if State authorities consent; nor if the men to compose the armies are entirely willing; but it is a power to raise and support armies given to Congress by the Constitution, without an if.

"It is clear that a constitutional law may not be expedient or proper. Such would be a law to raise armies when no armies were needed. But this is not such. The republican institutions and territorial integrity of our country cannot be maintained without the further raising and supporting of armies. There can be no army without men. Men can be had only voluntarily or involuntarily. We have ceased to obtain them voluntarily, and to obtain them involuntarily is the draft- the conscription. If you dispute the fact, and declare that men can still be had voluntarily in sufficient numbers, prove the assertion by yourselves volunteering in such numbers, and I shall gladly give up the draft. Or if not a sufficient number, but

any one of you will volunteer, he for his single self will escape all the horrors of the draft, and will thereby do only what each one of at least a million of his manly brethren have already done. Their toil and blood have been given as much for you as for themselves. Shall it all be lost rather than that you, too, will bear your part? "I do not say that all who would avoid serving in the war are unpatriotic; but I do think every patriot should willingly take his chance under a law, made with great care, in order to secure entire fairness. This law was considered, discussed, modified, and amended by Congress at great length, and with much labor; and was finally passed, by both branches, with a near approach to unanimity. At last, it may not be exactly such as any one man out of Congress, or even in Congress, would have made it. It has been said, and I believe truly, that the Constitution itself is not altogether such as any one of its framers would have preferred. It was the joint work of all, and certainly the better that it was so.

"Much complaint is made of that provision of the conscription law which allows a drafted man to substitute three hundred dollars for himself; while, as I believe, none is made of that provision which allows him to substitute another man for himself. Nor is the three hundred dollar provision objected to for unconstitutionality; but for inequality, for favoring the rich against the poor. The substitution of men is the provision, if any, which favors the rich to the exclusion of the poor. But this being a provision in accordance with an old and wellknown practice, in the raising of armies, is not objected to. There would have been great objection if that provision had been omitted. And yet being in, the money provision really modifies the inequality which the other introduces. It allows men to escape the service who are too poor to escape but for it. Without the money provision, competition among the more wealthy might, and probably would, raise the price of substitutes above three hundred dollars, thus leaving the man who could raise only three hundred dollars no escape from personal service. True, by the law as it is, the man who cannot raise so much as three hundred dollars, nor obtain a personal substitute for less, cannot escape; but he can come quite as near escaping as he could if the money provision were not in the law. To put it another way is an unobjectionable law which allows only the man to escape who can pay a thousand dollars, made objectionable by adding a provision that any one may escape who can pay the smaller sum of three hundred dollars? This is the exact difference at this point between the present law and all former draft laws. It is true that by this law a somewhat larger

number will escape than could under the law allowing personal substitutes only; but each additional man thus escaping will be a poorer man than could have escaped by the law in the other form. The money provision enlarges the class of exempts from actual service simply by admitting poorer men into it. How then can the money provision be a wrong to the poor man? The inequality complained of pertains in greater degree to the substitution of men, and is really modified and lessened by the money provision. The inequality could only be perfectly cured by sweeping both provisions away. This, being a great innovation, would probably leave the law more distasteful than it now is.

"The principle of the draft, which simply is involuntary or enforced service, is not new. It has been practiced in all ages of the world. It was well known to the framers of our Constitution as one of the modes of raising armies, at the time they placed in that instrument the provision that the Congress shall have power to raise and support armies.' It had been used just before, in establishing our independence, and it was also used under the Constitution in 1812. Wherein is the peculiar hardship now? Shall we shrink from the necessary means to maintain our free government, which our grandfathers employed to establish it and our own fathers have already employed once to maintain it? Are we degenerated? Has the manhood of our race run out?

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Again, a law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way. This law belongs to a class, which class is composed of those laws whose object is to distribute burthens or benefits on the principle of equality. No one of these laws can ever be practically administered with that exactness which can be conceived of in the mind. A tax law, the principle of which is that each owner shall pay in proportion to the value of his property, will be a dead letter, if no one can be compelled to pay until it can be shown that every other man will pay in precisely the same proportion, according to value; nay, even, it will be a dead letter, if no one can be compelled to pay until it is certain that every other one will pay at all-even in unequal proportion. Again, the United States House of Representatives is constituted on the principle that each member is sent by the same number of people that each other one is sent by; and yet, in practice, no two of the whole number, much less the whole number, are ever sent by precisely the same number of constituents. The districts cannot be made precisely equal in population at first, and if they could, they would become unequal in a single day, and much more so in

the ten years, which the districts, once made, are to continue. They cannot be remodeled every day; nor, without too much expense and labor, even every year.

"This sort of difficulty applies in full force to the practical administration of the draft law. In fact, the difficulty is greater in the case of the draft law. First, it starts with all the inequality of the congressional districts; but these are based on entire population, while the draft is based on those only who are fit for soldiers, and such may not bear the same proportion to the whole in one district that they do in another. Again, the facts must be ascertained, and credit given, for the unequal numbers of soldiers which have already gone from the several districts. In all these points errors will occur in spite of the utmost fidelity. The Government is bound to administer the law with such an approach to exactness as is usual in analogous cases, and as entire good faith and fidelity will reach. If so great departures as to be inconsistent with such good faith and fidelity, or great departures occurring in any way, be pointed out they shall be corrected; and any agent shown to have caused such departures intentionally shall be dismissed.

"With these views, and on these principles, I feel bound to tell you it is my purpose to see the draft law faithfully executed."

VALLANDIGHAM.

GENERAL BURNSIDE took command of the Department of the Ohio (March 26, 1863) with a zeal against the insurgents only heightened by his defeat at Fredericksburg. He found his department infested with a peculiarly bitter opposition to the Government and to the prosecution of the war, amounting, in his opinion, to positive aid and comfort to the enemy, and he determined to use all the powers confided to him to put an end to these manifestations, which he considered treason

1 One of Burnside's own staff-officers, Colonel J. M. Cutts, wrote to the President July 30: "Order 38 has kindled the fires of hatred and contention. Burnside is foolishly and unwisely excited, and if continued in command will disgrace himself, you, and the country, as he did at Fredericksburg."

2 At the first threat of civil war Vallandigham made haste to declare himself opposed to any forcible execution of the laws. He declared the States of the Union the only judges of the sufficiency and justice of secession, and declared he would never vote one dollar of money whereby one drop of American blood should be shed in civil war; and in February preceding the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln he proposed to amend the Constitution by dividing the Union into four sections, giving each section a veto on the passage of any law or the election of Presidents or Vice-Presidents, and allowing to each State the right of secession on certain specified terms. Having thus early taken his stand, he

able; and in the execution of this purpose he gave great latitude to the exercise of his authority. He was of a zealous and impulsive character, and weighed too little the consequences of his acts where his feelings were strongly enlisted. He issued, on the 13th of April, an order which obtained wide celebrity under the name of General Order No. 38, announcing that "all persons found within our lines, who commit acts for the benefit of the enemies of our country, will be tried as spies and traitors, and, if convicted, will suffer death." He enumerated, as among the acts which came within the view of this order, the writing and carrying of secret letters; passing the lines for treasonable purposes; recruiting for the Confederate service; harboring, concealing, or feeding public enemies within our lines; and passing beyond this reasonable category of offenses, he declared that "the habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy will no longer be tolerated in this department, and persons committing such offenses will at once be arrested, with a view to being tried, as above stated, or sent beyond our lines into the lines of their friends." And in conclusion he added a clause which may be made to embrace, in its ample sweep, any demonstration not to the taste of the general in command: "It must be distinctly understood that treason, expressed or implied, will not be tolerated in this department."

This order at once excited a most furious denunciation on the part of those who, either on account of their acts, or their secret sympathies, felt themselves threatened by it, and many even of those opponents of the Administration who were entirely loyal to the Union1 criticised the order as illegal in itself and liable to lead to dangerous abuses. The most energetic and eloquent of General Burnside's assailants was Clement L. Vallandigham, who had been for several years a member of Congress from Ohio, whose intemperate denunciation of the Government had caused him the loss of his seat,2 and whose defeat had only heightened the acerbretained his position with more consistency than was shown by any other member of his party. After his defeat by General R. C. Schenck, in his canvass for reëlection to Congress, he renewed his attacks upon the Government and its war policy with exaggerated ve hemence.

In a speech delivered in the House of Representatives on the 14th of January, 1863, he boasted that he was of that number who had opposed abolitionism or the political development of the antislavery sentiment of the North and West from the beginning. He called it the development of the spirit of intermeddling, whose children are strife and murder. He said: "On the 14th of April I believed that coercion would bring on war, and war disunion. More than that, I believed, what you all in your hearts believe to-day, that the South could never be conquered never. And not that only, but I was satisfied... that the secret but real purpose of the war was to abolish slavery in the States,

ity of his opposition to the war. General Order No. 38 furnished him a most inspiring text for assailing the Government, and he availed himself of it in Democratic meetings throughout the State. A rumor of his violent speeches came to the ears of the military authorities in Cincinnati, and an officer was sent, in citizen's clothes, to attend a meeting which was held at Mount Vernon, Ohio, where Mr. Vallandigham and other prominent Democrats were the orators of the day. The meeting was an enthusiastic one, full of zeal against the Government and of sympathy with the South. Mr. Vallandigham, feeling his audience thoroughly in harmony with him, spoke with unusual fluency and bitterness, greatly enjoying the applause of his hearers, and unconscious of the presence of the unsympathizing_recorder, who leaned against the platform a few feet away and took down some of his most malignant periods. He said it was the design of those in power to usurp a despotism; that it was not their intention to effect a restoration of the Union; that the Government had rejected every overture of peace from the South and every proposition of mediation from Europe; that the war was for the liberation of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites; that General Order No. 38 was a base usurpation of arbitrary power; that he despised it and spat upon it and trampled it under his feet. Speaking of the conscription act, he said the people were not deserving to be free men who would submit to such encroachment on their liberties. He called the President" King Lincoln," and advised the people to come up together at the ballot box and hurl the tyrant from his throne. The audience and the speaker were evidently in entire agreement. The crowd wore in great numbers the distinctive badges of "Copperheads " and "Butternuts," and amid cheers which Vallandigham's speech elicited the witness heard a shout that "Jeff Davis was a gentleman, which was more than Lincoln was.'

The officer returned to Cincinnati and made his report. Three days later, on the evening of the 4th of May, a special train went up to Dayton, with a company of the 115th Ohio, to arrest Mr. Vallandigham. Reaching Dayton they went at once to his house, where they arrived shortly before daylight, and demanded admittance. The orator appeared at an upper window and, being informed of their business, ... and with it... the change of our present democratical form of government into an imperial despotism.... I do not support the war; and to-day I bless God that not the smell of so much as one drop of its blood is upon my garments. Our Southern brethren were to be whipped back into love and fellowship at the point of the bayonet. Oh, monstrous delusion! ... Sir, history will record that after nearly six thousand years of folly and wickedness in every

refused to allow them to enter. He began shouting in a loud voice; pistols were fired from the house; the signals were taken up in the town, and, according to some preconcerted arrangement, the fire bells began to toll. There was evidently no time to be lost. The soldiers forced their way into the house; Vallandigham was compelled to make a hasty toilet, and was hurried to the cars, and the special train pulled out of the station before any considerable crowd could assemble. Arriving at Cincinnati, Vallandigham was consigned to the military prison and kept in close confinement. During the day he contrived, however, to issue an address to the Democracy of Ohio, saying:

I am here in a military bastile for no other offense than my political opinions, and the defense of them, and of the rights of the people, and of your constitutional liberties. . . I am a Democrat - for the Constitution, for law, for the Union, for liberty this is my only crime. Meanwhile, Demo crats of Ohio, of the North-west, of the United States, be firm, be true to your principles, to the Constitution, to the Union, and all will yet be well. To you, to the whole people, to Ťime, I appeal.

While he was issuing these fervid words his friends in Dayton were making their demonstration in another fashion. The town was filled with excitement all day. Crowds gathered on the streets discussing and denouncing the arrest. Great numbers of wagons loaded with rural friends and adherents of the agitator came in from the country and, the excitement increasing as night came on, a crowd of several hundred men moved, hooting and yelling, to the office of the Republican newspaper. Some one threw a brick at the building, then a volley of pistol shots was fired, and the excitement of the crowd wreaked itself on the unoffending building, which was first sacked, and then destroyed by fire. Later in the night a company of troops arrived from Cincinnati, and before midnight the crowd was dispersed and order was restored.

Mr. Vallandigham was promptly tried by a military commission, convened May 6 by General Burnside, consisting of officers of his staff and of the Ohio and Kentucky volunteers. Mr. Vallandigham made no individual objection to the court, but protested that they had no authority to try him; that he was in neither the land nor naval forces of the United States, nor in the militia, and was therefore amenable only to the form and administration of government, theocratic, democratic, monarchic, oligarchic, despotic, and mixed, it was reserved to American statesmanship, in the nineteenth century of the Christian era, to try the grand experiment, on a scale the most costly and gigantic in its proportions, of creating love by force and developing fraternal affection by war, and history will record, too, on the same page, the utter disastrous and most bloody failure of the experiment."

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