On Friday I’m wrapping up Steuben County Historical Society’s Civil War sesquicentennial series with a presentation on the end of the war, and the death of Lincoln, so I hope you’ll join us. But in the process of doing that research, I found out quite a lot about local OPPOSITION to Lincoln during the war.
We think of our region as being rock-ribbed Republican and dedicated to the abolition of slavery, but that’s wishful thinking. While overall people in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier supported Lincoln, there was also strong, and even hateful, opposition against him. And the region as a whole was very iffy on abolition.
Newspapers tended to be political party mouthpieces in those days, and the Steuben County seat of Bath had two… the “Courier” for Republicans, and the “Farmer’s Advocate” for Democrats.
The “Advocate” was in something of a bind, wanting to support the war without supporting the president – “Fight against Davis, argue against Lincoln.” They steered a masterly path of applauding Union victories while sneering that the administration had nothing to do with them – our brave soldiers won the fight despite Lincoln’s incompetence.
If Union troops lost, of course that was all Lincoln’s fault. Disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg was a “bloodthirsty atrocity of the radicals” – radicals being those Republicans who, UNlike Lincoln, were strongly committed to abolishing slavery, and doing it fast.
To give them their due, the editors published presidential proclamations in full, even if criticizing them fiercely in other columns. They also insisted that the highly unpopular draft law had been passed in the regular manner, and must be obeyed until and unless set aside by the courts. On July 1, 1863, with Confederate forces rampaging deep into Pennsylvania, “Advocate” editors announced that at the government’s request they were joining a general withholding of information on Union troop movements.
They did tend to overoptimistically view the south’s military condition, reporting in 1862 on the effectiveness of the Confederate draft, the huge size of the Confederate army, and the good provisioning of that army. Not one word of this was true. On July 1, 1863, they proclaimed “Vicksburg is impregnable” and it did in fact manage to hold out for three more days.
In one bizarre 1862 passage they supposedly report rebel prisoners as stating that if the states had been given permission to leave the Union the previous year, they would already have rejoined the Union. The supposed process seems to be (1) the southern states were not even thinking about seceding. (2) But the northern states, apparently out of the blue, told them they couldn’t. (3) So they did. (4) If no one had fussed, they then would have immediately joined back up. This, of course, is gibberish of the type you could ONLY find in an official party paper.
They also mocked Lincoln constantly… his having a bodyguard of troops, which no other president had had; his accent and ruralisms; his looks; his nickname of “Honest” Abe. For good measure they scorned his wife, sneering whenever one of her family members was killed fighting for the south.
And, they stressed that Lincoln’s actions, especially the Emancipation Proclamation, would make it impossible to restore “the Union as it was,” slavery and all. They didn’t face the fact that the south had HAD the Union as it was, and left it.
Unsurprisingly, much of their opposition was racist. They attack African Americans in the foulest and vilest terms – not for them the genteel circumlocutions that ooze from our TV today. In some of their mildest attacks:
“The relation of master and slave is a proper relationship.”
“When the Abolitionists began their crusade against he South, there lived 4,000,000 of as contented, well fed, well clad and well to do peasantry as ever lived on the face of the earth.”
“This war is to ripen into the horrible scenes of St. Domingo.”
To call slaves a contented, well-to-do peasantry is staggering chutzpah.
They seem to think that worst insult they can employ against Republican leaders and supporters is to call them black, which they do frequently, adding that the Republican plan is to bring white working men down to the level of the Negro.
Despite charges that Lincoln is a despot, a tyrant, a dictator, such papers abounded… I understand the one in Penn Yan was also vitriolic. Erastus Corning was a public and prominent Lincoln critic. A regular Congressional election took place in 1862, and Lincoln’s party lost ground, while still retaining control. Despite the best (or worst) efforts on the part of the “Advocate,” Steuben County increased its Republican vote in 1863.
Lincoln also beat off challengers from within his own party in 1864, and then won re-election against a popular general. But a month and ten days into his second term, a southern fanatic murdered him. That’s what we’ll be talking about 4 PM Friday, September 11 at Bath Fire Hall. Hope to see you there.