A souvenir from Harpers Ferry

Brig. Gen. Simon G. Griffin (fourth from left) and his brigade staff. Griffin lived in Concord before the war, in Keene after it. In the 1864 campaign he headed the Second Brigade of the Second Division of the 9th Corps.

During the spring of 1864, three veteran New Hampshire regiments – the 6th, the 9th and the 11th – joined two from Maine and one from Vermont in a New England brigade under Brigadier General Simon G. Griffin. A chapter in Our War begins on the late April day when these men proudly paraded past Willard’s Hotel in Washington, D.C. After they had passed the hotel balcony from which President Lincoln and Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside reviewed them, a soldier heard a spectator say: “New England troops – God bless them!”

The brigade was destined for Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, a string of bloody battles in the Wilderness and beyond. My mission in Our War was to show through the experiences of a few soldiers in these regiments the travails of the many. One soldier I chose was Orlando W. Dimick, a 24-year-old 11th New Hampshire lieutenant from Lyme.

Recently I had the pleasure of telling a short version of his story during a presentation to the Lyme Historians, the busy historical society in this beautiful town in western New Hampshire.

Lt. (later Capt.) Orlando W. Dimick

The story is a good one. Dimick was captured at Spottsylvania the night of June 12, 1864. He spent months in officers’ prisons in the South before escaping and making his way across 250 miles of hostile territory to freedom.

One of his corporals wasn’t so lucky. The prisoner train dropped Cpl. Webster D. Huse of Enfield, N.H., off at Andersonville, Ga., where, in the prison known as Camp Sumter, he died of disease that October.

The Lyme Historians publish a fine newsletter, and lo and behold the current number (Spring 2013) contains a letter from Dimick that I had not seen.

His capture, imprisonment and escape lay nearly two years ahead. He addressed this letter to a cousin from near Harpers Ferry, Va.., in 1862 The 11th was then on the way south after its recruitment late that summer.

Dimick had left Dartmouth College after his freshman year to join the 11th. His letter shows what a clear and informative writer he was – something I benefited from when I used his account of his captivity to tell his story in Our War.

Here is the a large chunk of the letter.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Sandy Hook [Md.], Oct. 5, 1862

Dear cousin,

We are now on the Maryland side of the Potomac, about a mile below Harper’s Ferry which lies on the Virginia side of the Potomac, at its junction with the Shenandoah and between the two rivers. I went through the place yesterday and beyond it about a mile and a half to Bolivar Heights to visit the Fifth N.H. Volunteers.* The town is a desolate looking place now but looks as though it might once have been a very busy and pretty place.

The brick walls of most of the government buildings are still standing, the woodwork having been burned, except the engine house in which John Brown was taken. This, I believe, is the only one of the government buildings which remains unharmed. The other buildings were none of them burned that I saw in the village. We had to cross a pontoon bridge to get over there. The railroad bridge, which you will remember the rebels burned when they last evacuated the place, has been rebuilt so that the cars crossed last Thursday for the first time. On the walls of the engine house can be seen where were the holes which John Brown made for port holes to shoot through which are now filled with new brick. Enclosed you will find a heart which I whittled from a piece of wood that I cut from the door post of the building.

The old soldiers here are strong against Col. Miles who surrendered here and say if the rebels had not killed him, his own soldiers would have done so. You are probably familiar with the newspaper representations of the needless surrender and I believe they agree nearly with those I have heard from the soldiers here. Certainly the position of Maryland Heights is a very commanding one, and it seems to me together with the fortifications on the Virginia side and the number of men he had, he should have held the place.**

I find too, that since I came to Washington every soldier and officer that I have heard speak of McDowell pronounce him a traitor and say if it had not been for him, Jackson or at least his army would have been taken at the Bull Run battle.*** . . .

The Lyme boys are all well except Thrasher is at Washington and has had a fever but is getting better and hopes to join us soon [Edwin Thrasher, a 21-year-old private, was discharged and sent home ill two months later]. Kibbee was at Frederick City when we came from there day before yesterday [Pvt. Howard C. Kibbee, 18, was also from Lyme].

There were all sorts of rumors in camp, and have been for more than a week about peace measures which I will not relate for I take but little stock in them myself. If they are true, we shall all know at the proper time. . . .”

*Along with the rest of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s army, the Fifth was resting on Bolivar Heights after fighting at Antietam 18 days earlier.

**Col. Dixon S. Miles mounted a poor defense of Harpers Ferry. Stonewall Jackson’s men took Maryland Heights, and rebel artillery pounded Harpers Ferry from there. Miles knew his force was helpless. On Sept. 15, 1862, two days before Antietam, he was hit in the leg by an artillery shell while surrendering Harpers Ferry and his troops. He died the next day. 

***This is a reference to the Second Bull Run battle, Aug. 29-30, 1862, in which Irvin McDowell was among the generals blamed for defeat. He was also the losing general at the first Bull Run battle on July 21, 1861.

Colonel Cross, in his own words

Colonel Edward E. Cross was one of New Hampshire's most compelling Civil War soldiers. While I was working on Our War, several fellow historians with an interest in Cross helped me find documents that Mark Travis and I did not see before we wrote My Brave Boys: To War with Colonel Cross and the Fighting Fifth. Today I thought I'd share one of the more interesting of these letters with you.

It requires a little background. I used the letter in the Our War chapter about Cross's striking statement to a friend in July 1861. "I am ready for the wars," he wrote. But what did he mean?

Cross had been interested in "things milingtary" since his youth, but his principal military experience came between January 1859 and June 1861, which he spent in Arizona. At the time, Arizona was not yet a territory in its own right but part of the New Mexico Territory.

Don Miguel Antonio Otero

Cross went there as an officer and investor in a silver-mining company. On behalf of the company, he started The Weekly Arizonian, the first newspaper in Arizona, and later manged a mine. Inevitably he was drawn into the effort to secure the area -- namely to make it safe from attacks and thefts by Apaches and other American Indians.

By late 1859, his reputation was already such that Don Miguel Antonio Otero, New Mexico’s delegate to Congress, asked him to report on how and where to position U.S. troops to make New Mexico Territory more hospitable for settlers and miners. As I write in Our War, Cross's report to Otero was "a tour de force."

Edward R. Sweeney, author of a comprehensive biography of Cochise, found the report in the National Archives, and John Fahey, a mutual acquaintance, shared it with me.

Here is Cross's Dec. 29, 1859, letter to Otero:

A Civil War veteran speaks from experience

Recently I spoke about Our War at the library in Dunbarton, N.H. As usual, I did a little research beforehand. I learned that 130 able-bodied men lived in the town in 1861 and that Dunbarton was asked in various call-ups during the war to supply 54 soldiers. Sixty-five men volunteered for service, and the town provided 15 substitutes – men from elsewhere to whom the town paid bounties to fill its draft quotas later in the war.

A map on a battlefield marker  at Third Winchester shows the 14th New
Hampshire's charge. The regiment was part of Brig. Gen. Henry W. Birge's
brigade (blue arrow closest to left side of Confederate line). Maj. James
Breathed's rebel artillery, at left on map, pounded the attacking Yankees.    

Two brothers who were natives of Dunbarton fought with the 14th New Hampshire Volunteers at the third battle of Winchester, Va., on Sept. 19, 1864. On our drive to Florida in March, my wife Monique and I stopped at the battlefield and the Union and Confederate cemeteries there. The battlefield is still farmland, lovely and rolling, well-marked and well-preserved, a joy to walk.

With a little preparation you can see exactly what happened to the men of the 14th. They took heavy fire from Confederate artillery under Maj. James Breathed on their right flank as they marched out of the woods and into an open field. The wheat had recently been harvested, leaving the stalks cut to stubble. Confederate Col. William H. Payne said of Breathed: "(He) fought the Yankees because he hated them. When he entered a battle, it was to kill. . . . He would have thought it an insult to his dead comrades to dream in a nightmare that we were rightfully beaten and that they had died in a foolish cause." 

Brig. Gen. Henry Birge, in whose brigade the 14th New Hampshire advanced across what is known as the Middle Field at Winchester, described the charge:

"[We] crossed this field under an artillery and infantry fire from the enemy . . . and when within 200 yards charged with fixed bayonets at double quick. [We] broke his line on the entire front and drove him through and out of the woods. As the troops entered the woods, I was ordered by Gen. Grover to halt and hold that position and not to go farther into the woods, but the charge was so rapid and impetuous and the men so much excited by the sight of the enemy in full retreat before them that it was impossible to execute the order, and the whole line pressed forward to the extreme edge of the timber." 

The Union troops were now exposed, and the rebel counterattack was fierce. Brig. Gen. William Emory, the Union corps commander known as "Old Bricktop," summed up what was happening to his men this way: "My God! This is a slaughterhouse."

Fifty-four men of the 14th New Hampshire were killed and scores more wounded.

Dunbarton, N.H., celebrated its centennial on Sept. 13, 1865, almost exactly a year after this battle. The war was over but fresh in mind. David Macurdy, one of the two brothers originally from Dunbarton who fought in the 14th New Hampshire, spoke that day. Macurdy, who was 33 years old, had been wounded at Winchester leading his company. His younger brother Mathew, a sergeant in the company, had been killed.

Initially a first sergeant in the 14th New
 Hampshire, David A. Macurdy was a
captain by Third Winchester. (Photo
courtesy of David Morin.)

Capt. Macurdy’s speech for the town’s hundredth birthday conveyed his thinking about the war during its immediate aftermath. The Wirz he mentioned was Henry Wirz, commandant at the notorious Camp Sumter prison in Andersonville, Ga., which I write about in Our War. Wirz was hanged two months after Macurdy’s speech, although based on my reading, he had tried his best to improve the conditions he inherited when he took over the camp. I see him as a scapegoat for higher-ups who thwarted his quest for better food and sanitation.

Here is what Capt. Macurdy said to the veterans in the Dunbarton crowd in 1865, five months after Appomattox:

“My fellow soldiers, we who have survived the terrible conflict of the past four years, and are permitted to return to the embraces of the loved ones at home and the peaceful pursuits of civil life, let us make as good and faithful citizens as we have been soldiers. Then we shall have the proud satisfaction of having done our duty faithfully to our country in its time of need, and to our fellow men.

“And to the misguided people of the South, to the rank and file of the rebel armies, we offer pardon. At the same time we demand that justice be meted out to the leaders, to those who have murdered our brothers by the thousand in the southern prison pens. It is difficult to conceive of a punishment for those men too severe. The trial of Wirz, now going on at Washington, is daily developing facts in connection with the Andersonville prison too revolting to be mentioned here. Thousands have there suffered and died from starvation, martyrs to Truth, Liberty and Law. Their memories shall be ever cherished by a grateful people. Their graves, although far from the homes they loved, where no wife, mother or sister can scatter flowers or wet with their tears, shall ever be kept sacred.

Soldiers who died in and around Winchester lie in the National Cemetery. 

“We trust that sweet peace will smile on our beloved land for all time to come, but if treason shall again raise its unholy head, if traitors shall again assail the old flag, our swords, our muskets, our lives are pledged on our country’s altar. And we swear by the graves of our dead brothers, scattered all over the South, we swear by the grave of our murdered President, that hereafter traitors shall receive a traitor’s reward, and the assassin the assassin’s doom.”

These words speak to the fire that still remained in the hearts of Union veterans just after the war. At the Winchester cemetery today, the dead of the 14th New Hampshire – probably including Mathew Macurdy, the captain’s brother – lie beneath an obelisk in a mass grave. Thus when David Macurdy  spoke of “our dead brothers, scattered all over the South,” he spoke from personal experience.

(Accounts of Monique's and my visit to Winchester are here. and here. Since that visit, It has been decided that the battlefield will be improved to look even more as it did on Sept. 19, 1864. That story is here.)

Standing proudly before a fate unknown

Men of Company A, 16th New Hampshire Volunteers, on the Lyme Common in 1862. 

On the second floor of the smartly restored Academy Building in Lyme, N.H., hangs a blown-up photograph of about 45 men from Company A of the 16th New Hampshire Volunteers. The men stand erect on the town common before the white buildings and nearly barren hills of Lyme.

The picture captures what must have been a proud moment for the men and their families. Nothing about it hints at their grim future.

The picture was probably taken in late October or early November of 1862. The soldiers are unidentified, but Company A was recruited in and around Lyme. Most likely the men are from Lyme, Orford, Dorchester, Hanover, Lebanon and other local towns. Two officers stand in front of the enlisted men. Possibly they are 38-year-old Lt. Bela Sawyer of Lyme and 26-year-old Capt. Elias Smith of Plainfield.

The 16th New Hampshire was a nine-month regiment recruited to help fill the state’s quota in response to President Lincoln’s call for 300,000 troops. (The normal Union enlistment term was three years.) After mustering in, the regiment trained briefly on Concord Heights and headed south on Nov. 23. In its nine months of service the regiment never fought in a battle. Instead it was sent to guard Fort Burton, a former rebel outpost in the Louisiana bayou country.

This proved to be as deadly an assignment as almost any in the Union army. I found many letters and accounts of the regiment’s time at Fort Burton and its return home in August 1863. Sick men died all along the way, and many more died after reaching home. The dying continued for months after they regiment mustered out on Aug. 20.

Using the data in regimental rosters, I calculated that of the more than 900 members of the regiment, 300 died of the fevers, diarrhea and dysentery they contracted in Louisiana. I used these calculations and the  documentary record to write one of the most tragic chapters of Our War.

Below, from Augustus Ayling’s Register, is a list of dead Company A men from Lyme and neighboring towns. The age listed after each name is from the time of enlistment, in late 1862. As you’ll see, some died in Louisiana, some on the way home (Vicksburg, Miss., Mound City, Ill., Buffalo, N.Y.), some after reaching Concord.

There are 30 dead men in all from just one of the 16th New Hampshire’s ten companies. Eleven of them are from Lyme. No doubt some of the men in the photograph on the Lyme Common are on this list, but there is no telling who or how many.

Pvt. Charles J. Allen, 22, Lyme, died June 7, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Charles M. Avery, 36, Orford, died June 17, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Charles Baker, 36, Orford, died June 17, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Lewis Biathrow Jr., 23, Grantham, died June 5, 1863, New Orleans.

Cpl. Ransom Brocklebank, 43, Plainfield, died June 14, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Benjamin W. Chapman, 41, Plainfield (musician), died Aug. 5, 1863, near Vicksburg, Miss.

Pvt. George F. Chase, 19, Lyme, discharged with disease July 10, 1863, died Jan. 4, 1864, Lyme.

Pvt. Norman D. Comings, 20, Cornish, died Aug. 14, 1863, Mound City, Ill.

Pvt. Freeman J. Converse, 22, Lyme, died Dec. 23, 1863, Lyme.

Pvt. Joseph B. Cutler, 39, Plainfield, died June 21, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Seneca Ellis, 45, Cornish, died Aug. 26, 1863, Cornish.

Pvt. Phineas P. Gilbert, 33, Lyme, died Aug. 29, 1863, Lyme.

Pvt. Asa F. Gordon, 21, Lyme, died May 25, 1863, Brashear City, La.

Pvt. Edwin R. Houston, 31, Dorchester, died May 5, 1863, Brashear City, La.

Pvt. John L. Howard, 21, Lyme, died Aug. 24, 1863, Orford.

Pvt. Ira A. Johnson, 39, Plainfield, died August 4, 1863, near Vicksburg, Miss.

Pvt. Joseph Moore, 24, Lyme, died Aug. 21, 1863, Concord.

Pvt. Frank Norton, 28, Lebanon, died Aug. 18, 1863, Mound City, Ill.

Pvt. Alphonso Palmer, 18, Orford, died Aug. 9, 1863, near Vicksburg, Miss.

Pvt. Frank B. Porter, 19, Lyme, died Sept. 13, 1863, Lyme.

Pvt. Austin Ramsey, 27, Lyme, died Aug. 18, 1863, Concord.

Pvt. Enoch P. Smith, 33, Orford, died July 26, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Silas Spaulding, 38, Cornish, died Sept. 20, 1863, Cornish.

Pvt. Alonzo Stark, 27, Bath (musician), died June 16, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Irenus Stark, 21, Lyme, died June 3, 1863, Brashear City, La.

Pt. Luther S. Stone, 18, Plainfield, died July 7, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. John M. Vinton, 23, Plainfield, died June 16, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. John H. White, 23, Lebanon, died Aug. 12, 1863, Mound City, Ill.

Pvt. Edward C. Whittaker, 26, Lebanon, died July 25, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. William W. Williams, 18, Lyme, died Aug. 26, 1863, Buffalo, N.Y.

A place out of time

Although it can lead to long drives and long days, one of the pleasures of my speaking tour to promote Our War is the chance to see new places and meet new people. That was certainly the case Sunday afternoon at the annual meeting of the Lyme Historians, whom I had never heard of until their president invited me.

Lucy Marie and her grandfather

Half the fun was getting there. After I had accepted the invitation, my son and his wife scheduled the baptism of Monique’s and my astonishing granddaughter, Lucy Marie, for that morning. They live in South Portland, Maine, nearly two hours from our home in Concord. Lyme is on the western edge of New Hampshire, at least three hours from Portland.

The baptism was in the Cathedral of St. Luke. Lucy Marie warmed up her voice properly early in the service and provided the sound-effects -- solo, no less -- during the holy rite. She hit her crescendo right on cue, as the priest doused her head. The other two babies, oblivious to what was expected of them, remained silent throughout.

Monique and I had to leave for Lyme right after the service. We were perplexed when the GPS did not take us to I-95, the Maine Turnpike. We are new to the GPS, but after it guided us out of a barren wilderness in west Georgia last winter, in GPS we trust. Sort of. As we followed the monotone prompts, we fended off suspicions that we were headed for Canada. 

The GPS guided us across central Maine and upper-central New Hampshire almost entirely on country roads. In three hours we drove less than a mile on an interstate. It was beautiful, one part nostalgia, one part new, all clothed in the spring green that still prevails just south of the White Mountains.

We entered New Hampshire at Freedom where, when our children were small long ago, we climbed Prospect Mountain. This is no 4,000-footer, but like many of our hikes, it was notable for its high view-to-strain ratio. Farther on, we saw the incisor-like peak of Mount Chocorua, a much harder climb that we made twice with our boys.

As we approached Chocurua on one of those hikes, our middle son Yuri kept falling behind as he stopped to examine the creatures in the small pools on boulders in a marsh. This was a boy who loved showing us the bones in owl scat. This curiosity proved to be a harbinger. He majored in biochemistry in college and is now a cardiologist.

Warren's Redstone rocket

When we passed Squam Lake, we remembered the day a ranger on the fire tower on nearby Red Hill pointed out to us where the Henry Fonda character in On Golden Pond crashed his boat. After driving by signs for Castle in the Clouds, the Loon Center and the Polar Caves, we turned back west. We were just a couple of miles short of Warren, where we had taken the boys one Sunday to see a real Redstone rocket. It stands in a park, as though waiting for some modern-day Alan Shepard to hop aboard. (You can read about its 1971 overland journey from Alabama to Warren here.) 

Then we reached roads we had never driven before, leaving Wentworth and passing Mount Cube Farm in Orford. This was the home of the late, sometimes loony (he wanted to arm the New Hampshire National Guard with nuclear weapons, example) Gov. Meldrim Thomson. The Thomson name is still on nearly everything in the town.

From Orfordville we drove south into Lyme. In a subsequent post (or maybe two) I’ll tell you about the fruits of my two hours with the Lyme Historians, the group that has banded together to learn, preserve and protect the town’s history.

Meanwhile, the trip there was eventful enough to be worth its own post. In so many ways, outwardly at least, this rural, very-north-of-Boston region defies the passage of time. Constancy, tradition and respect for the past are New Hampshire assets. I'm not saying I expected to see the Boys in Blue mustering on the town commons we passed, but they would not have looked out of place.

Gallery: What the rebels won at Gettysburg

Detail of Louisiana's monument, dedicated in 1971 on the Gettysburg battlefield.

The Confederates didn’t win much at Gettysburg, but they did win the battle of the monuments. It took a while, and they won it only in aesthetics, not in numbers.

There are 1,328 monuments and memorials on the battlefield. Despite the seeming exactitude of this number, it is almost always preceded by “approximately,” leaving room for the possibility that even today stone sentinels are hiding somewhere on the vast battlefield. Nearly all the Union monuments were put up during the late 19th century to honor specific regiments, brigades, corps and states. This is no surprise. Gettysburg is in a Union state, and the Union army won a decisive victory there.

From the Virginia monument (1917)

The first Confederate monument, Virginia’s, went up in 1917, more than half a century after the battle. Several other states erected monuments during and just after the centennial of the war.

In part, the addition of these monuments, even in the 1960s, was a sop to Jim Crow America. They represented the triumph of reunion over abolition as the object of the postwar peace, a preference that began with the Civil War veterans themselves. No matter which side they fought on, the white veterans had much more in common with each other than they did with the African-Americans freed by the war. When Reconstruction failed, most northerners accepted the racist regime that supplanted the so-called peculiar institution.

Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1965)

Because the Confederate monuments came later, they appeal much more to modern sensibilities than their Union counterparts. Some Union monuments have an antiquated Victorian charm or a neat specificity about the things soldiers carried, but most are stiff and stodgy. By contrast, the faces and postures depicted on southern monuments are romantic and heroic, befitting the myth of the Lost Cause. These are solid men, selfless and fearless men, shapely men, supermen -- little clusters of Clark Kents rendered in stone and bronze. Some statues even look biblical, conjuring visions of the archangel Gabriel trumpeting the saints into line of battle or Moses leading his beleaguered people to the Promised Land.

Over the years, my friend Dave Sullivan, a watercolor artist and photographer who helped me assemble the more than 100 photographs that appear in Our War, has shot many pictures of the Confederate statues at Gettysburg. I’m posting several of them in this gallery.

To my eye their well-chiseled beauty exceeds that of their far more plentiful brethren in the fields and ridges just across the Emmitsburg Road, a short but deadly charge away.

Detail from the Mississippi monument (1973)

Virginia (1917)

North Carolina (1929)

Detail from the North Carolina monument, dedicated in 1929.

  

Why couldn't Franklin Pierce just keep his mouth shut?

When I was researching Our War, Peter Wallner ran the library at the New Hampshire Historical Society. Peter is the author of Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire’s Favorite Son and Franklin Pierce: Martyr for the Union, a two-volume biography of the 14th president. His knowledge of the period and the Historical Society’s collections were invaluable during my work.

For a post on this blog, I asked him this question:

Unlike James Buchanan, the other Doughface president of the 1850s, Franklin Pierce spoke out during the Civil War, at first anonymously through the Democratic press and later publicly. This seems to run counter to the established behavior for former presidents. Why did Pierce feel compelled to participate in politics, and what effect do you think his speaking out had on his reputation?

Here is Peter’s response:

In his autobiography, published in 1885, Ulysses S. Grant, acknowledged his friendship with Franklin Pierce during the Mexican War. “I knew him more intimately than I did any other of the volunteer generals,” Grant wrote. He felt the need to correct history as it characterized Pierce, describing him as “a gentleman and a man of courage.”

Peter Wallner is the author of a two-
volume biography of Franklin Pierce,
New Hampshire's only U.S. president.

Dying of cancer at the time he was writing, Grant had nothing to lose in praising Pierce. The 14th president may have felt the same way during the Civil War when he was outspoken in opposing the war, particularly the policies of President Lincoln. Pierce had no political aspirations at the time but felt a need to defend his party and the policies of Jacksonian Democracy, which he had always espoused.

Throughout his political career Pierce had warned of the centralizing tendencies of the opposition party. Whether that party was Federalist, Whig or Republican, he believed its entire motive was to increase the power of the government in Washington to control the common people for the benefit of the privileged classes.

To Pierce, only three things would come of a stronger central government, and all were bad for the average citizen: he would be taxed and drafted to fight in wars, and his freedoms would be restricted. The Civil War was the fruition of all of Pierce’s fears, as the Lincoln administration used the national crisis as the excuse to tax, to draft and to restrict constitutional rights.

Pierce was particularly angered by the violations of the Constitution resulting from Lincoln’s policies. He first objected to the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus by executive order when the Constitution specifically stated that only Congress may suspend the writ. This was followed by the shutting down of newspapers that had criticized the President, the jailing by the military of at least 38,000 northern civilians, military trials of civilians and the persecution of political figures like Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham.*

Knowing Pierce’s views on the war, the Lincoln administration kept a close surveillance of his activities. Secretary of State William Seward suspected Pierce of treasonable activity on a trip to Michigan. These accusations increased Pierce’s anger, and he insisted on a Senate investigation, which cleared his name.

As more and more former friends and colleagues, many of whom were serving in the Union army, complained to the former president of their treatment by abolitionist Republicans, Pierce spoke out publicly. 

He chose a Democratic Party rally in Concord, N.H., on July 4, 1863, attended by as many as 25,000. 

Warned by friends that he could be jailed for expressing his antiwar views, Pierce lashed out at Lincoln: “True it is, that any of you, that I, may be the next victim of unconstitutional, arbitrary, irresponsible power. But we, nevertheless, are free men, and we resolve to live, or if it must be, to die, such.”

Pierce’s speech was roundly criticized in the national press as defeatist or even treasonous, and, as usual, his timing was poor. News of the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg reached Concord in the midst of the rally. The Irish anti-draft riots in New York later in July were also blamed in part on Pierce’s antiwar speech. Pierce retreated to the sidelines, making no further public pronouncements during the War.

Peter Wallner,
Pierce biographer

Grant was right: Pierce was courageous, perhaps even foolhardy, in speaking out so publicly at a time of national emergency. But he raised an important issue that has never been clarified: What powers does a president have in wartime?

In 1866, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan that the Constitution is “a law for rulers and people, equally in time of war and peace.” The 9-0 decision by a court made up largely of Lincoln appointees overturned the conviction by a military court of an Indiana man during the Civil War. Legal scholars have noted that the ruling has been frequently ignored by later presidents during national emergencies.

Pierce sacrificed what was left of his reputation by opposing the president’s policies during the greatest national crisis in U.S. history.  He never retreated from his opposition to the war and to the policies of the Lincoln administration, but his conduct during the war added the charge of treason to his reputation as a failed president.

*For more on the suppression of constitutional liberties during the Civil War see: Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984); Jeffrey Manber and Neil Dahlstrom, Lincoln’s Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels, and a President’s Mission to Destroy the Press (Naperville, Ill., Sourcebooks, Inc., 2005); Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War, 1860-1868 (New York: Norton, 1977).