Diary of Gideon Welles: Thursday, September 17, 1863

Unpleasant rumors of a disagreement between Dahlgren and Gillmore and that the latter had requested to be relieved of his present command. This, I think, must be a mischievous rumor, — perhaps a speculative one.

A new panic is rising respecting the ironclads in England, and some of our sensation journals fan the excitement. It does not surprise me that the New York Times, Raymond's paper, controlled by Thurlow Weed, and all papers influenced by Seward should be alarmed. The latter knows those vessels are to be detained, yet will not come out and state the fact, but is not unwilling to have apprehension excited. It will glorify him if it is said they are detained through protest from our minister. If he does not prompt the Times, he could check its loud apprehensions. I am under restrictions which prevent me from making known facts that would dissipate this alarm. The Evening Post, I am sorry to see, falls in with the Times and its managers, and unwittingly assists those whom it does not admire. Both these journals are importunate, and insist that the Roanoke shall be returned to New York. But the Navy Department is not under newspaper control, though they have the cooperation of distinguished men. To station a steam frigate in New York would involve the necessity of stationing one also in the Delaware, and another at Boston. There would be no limit to the demand for naval defenses, yet it is claimed the coast defenses belong exclusively to the military.

SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 1: 1861 – March 30, 1864, p. 434-5

Diary of John Hay: November 11, 1864

At the meeting of the Cabinet to-day the President took out a paper from his desk, and said:— “Gentlemen, do you remember last summer I asked you all to sign your names to the back of a paper of which I did not show you the inside? This is it? Now, Mr. Hay, see if you can get this open without tearing it.” He had pasted it up in so singular style that it required some cutting to get it open. He then read as follows:—

Executive Mansion,

Washington, Aug. 23, 1864.

This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.

A. LINCOLN.

This was indorsed :—

William H. Seward,

W. P. Fessenden,

Edwin M. Stanton,

Gideon Welles,

Edw. Bates,

M. Blair,

J. P. Usher.

The President said:— “You will remember that this was written at a time (six days before the Chicago nominating Convention) when as yet we had no adversary, and seemed to have no friends. I then solemnly resolved on the course of action indicated above. I resolved, in case of the election of General McClellan, being certain that he would be the candidate, that I would see him and talk matters over with him. I would say, “General, the election has demonstrated that you are stronger, have more influence with the American people than I. Now let us together, you with your influence, and I with all the executive power of the government, try to save the country. You raise as many troops as you possibly can for this final trial, and I will devote all my energies to assisting and finishing the war.”

Seward said:— “And the General would answer you ‘Yes, Yes;’ and the next day when you saw him again, and pressed these views upon him, he would say, ‘Yes, Yes;’ and so on forever, and would have done nothing at all.”

“At least,” added Lincoln, "I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience."

The speeches of the President at the last two serenades are very highly spoken of. The first I wrote after the fact, to prevent the “loyal Pennsylvanians” getting a swing at it themselves. The second one, last night, the President himself wrote late in the evening, and read it from the window :— “Not very graceful,” he said: “but I am growing old enough not to care much for the manner of doing things.”

To-day I got a letter from Raymond breathing fire and vengeance against the Custom House which came so near destroying him in his district. I read it to the President. He answered that it was the spirit of such letters as that, that created the faction and malignity of which Raymond complained.

It seems utterly impossible for the President to conceive of the possibility of any good resulting from a rigorous and exemplary course of punishing political dereliction. His favorite expression is:— “I am in favor of short statutes of limitations in politics.”

SOURCES: Clara B. Hay, Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, Volume 1, p. 242-5; Michael Burlingame & John R. Turner Ettlinger, Editors, Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, p. 247-9.

Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, July 24, 1864

Ashfield, Mass., 24 July, 1864.

. . . This week, let us hope, we shall hear that Sherman is in Atlanta, and that he is breaking up the army opposed to him. His work is not better done than Grant will do his. But I do not want peace till there is certainty of our carrying the Amendment to the Constitution. We must have that to make peace sure.

The Rebel self-appointed peacemakers took nothing by their move, and Lincoln showed as usual his straightforward good sense. What a contrast between him and the politicians who fancy themselves his superiors in insight and shrewdness! What does Raymond¹ mean by his Saturday's article on Lincoln's statement of terms? Is he hedging for a reconstruction with slavery? If so, he is more shortsighted and more unprincipled than I believed. I never fancied, indeed, that he had principles, and I thought he had learned enough not to confess such bad ones. . . .

_______________

¹ Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times.

SOURCE: Sara Norton and  M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 274

Diary of John Beauchamp Jones: October 17, 1861

Hurlbut has been released from prison. Mr. Hunter has a letter (intercepted) from Raymond, editor of the New York Times, addressed to him since the battle of Manassas.

SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 1, p. 85

Henry J. Raymond to Abraham Lincoln, March 15, 1862

State of New York.

Assembly Chamber.

Albany March 15 1862

Dear Sir: –

You will have seen long before this reaches you, I presume, that the Times has published several articles in support of your special message. As soon as I saw the one to which you allude, I telegraphed to the office to sustain the message without qualification or cavil, and I believe the paper has done so since.

As soon as the message reached us here I drew a resolution & caused it to be introduced into the Assembly endorsing the your recommendations. We shall pass it as soon as it can be reached.

I regard the message as a master-piece of practical wisdom and sound policy. It is marked by that plain, self-vindicating common-sense which, with the people, overbears, as it ought, all the abstract speculations of mere theorists and confounds, all the schemes of selfish intriguers, – and which, you will permit me to say, has preeminently characterized every act of your Administration. It furnishes a solid, practical, constitutional basis for the treatment of this great question, and suggests the only feasible mode I have yet seen of dealing with a problem infinitely more difficult than the suppression of the rebellion. It shall have my most cordial & hearty support.

I take the liberty of enclosing here with some remarks I have made on two or three topics of common interest.

I am, with great respect,

Your obedient servant,

Henry J. Raymond

His Excellency
President Lincoln.

SOURCE: This letter can be found in the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress.

Abraham Lincoln to Henry J. Raymond, March 9, 1862

Private

Executive Mansion

Washington, 9 March 1862.

 Hon. Henry J. Raymond:

My dear Sir:

I am grateful to the New York journals, and not less so to the “Times” than to others, for their kind notices of the late special message to Congress.

Your paper, however, intimates that the proposition, though well intentioned, must fail on the score of expense. I do hope you will reconsider this. Have you noticed the facts that less than one half-day's cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware at $400 per head — that eighty-seven days' cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price? Were those States to take the step, do you doubt that it would shorten the war more than eighty-seven days, and thus be an actual saving of expense?

Please look at these things and consider whether there should not be another article in the “Times.”

Yours very truly,

a. lincoln

SOURCE: A copy of this letter can be found in the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress.

George William Curtis to Charles Eliot Norton, June 16, 1864

My Dear Charles, — I hope you like our Baltimore work. The unanimity and enthusiasm were most imposing. I voted against the admission of Tennessee, because I did not want the convention to meddle with the question; and, since she only wanted to come in to help do what we were sure to do without her, I thought that, as the cause was exactly the same for both of us, she should give us forbearance while we gave her sympathy. But it was impossible to resist the torrent, and they all came in. There is no harm done. I cannot but think Sumner wrong. If all New York rebels, I am still a citizen of the United States. That is the simple, obvious, necessary ground.

The committee of one from each State appointed me to write the official letter to the President, and refused to instruct me. I sent it yesterday, having read it to Mr. Bryant and to Raymond. They were both entirely pleased with everything in it.

SOURCE: Edward Cary, George William Curtis, p. 178-9

John M. Forbes to Nassau W. Senior, December 10, 1861

Boston, December 10,1861.

My Dear Me. Senior, — I have yours of the 20th ulto. I shall read with much interest your article upon the nature of our government, and am glad you came to the same conclusion which everybody here long since arrived at except Calhoun and his gang of conspirators.

I don't blame Lord Russell for being puzzled at any question which you say has two sides to it; but I do blame him for jumping at his conclusions in such hot haste that he could not await the arrival of our new minister, whose explanation might have given him some light.

You don't blame the doctor (Medico) when, called to a serious case, he happens to take the dark view of it, and sentences the patient to “dissolution;” but you do think him a blunderer if he hastens to tell the victim that he has only to make his arrangements for his funeral!

Louis Napoleon, by quietly holding back his opinions and then uttering them covered up with sugared words, puts himself, with the masses of our people, where England was a few months since, our natural ally! Of course it is an enormous humbug, and thinking men are not gulled by it, but none the less [the situation] operates to inflame the old animosities that had grown out of two wars and that had been just forgotten.

Another thing must not be forgotten. The French press has not the chance, even when it has the will, to do the mischief that yours and ours has. We hardly read anything from the French papers; they still less read American papers, and this makes the grand difference between our situation as relating to the two countries.

You read our New York “Herald” edited by a renegade Scotchman . . . and you take it for the representative of American journalism! The “Herald” is really the organ of the seceders, it was so openly until after Sumter surrendered; and only came over nominally to the Northern side under the terrors of mob law. It has since served its masters still better by sowing the seeds of dissension between us and England.

We, with perhaps equal blindness, permit the “Times” and half a dozen other papers to stand for “England.” I look for a grand paper duello upon the Trent question, and shall be relieved if it goes no further. Should the questions assume a warlike aspect, we shall only be driven the sooner to our last desperate resort, emancipation. We are now only divided into two parties at the North, viz.: those who would use the negro when we can see no other way of conquering; and secondly, those who would use the negro at once, wherever he can be used to strengthen us or weaken the enemy! The logic of events has been from day to day settling this question, and if our talking men in Congress can only be patient or self-denying in the outpouring of patriotic words, we shall go on fast enough. . . .

You cannot believe we shall subjugate ten millions of people. Nor I; but classify these ten millions and all is changed. At least two are avowed loyalists in the border States; four more are blacks ready to help us when we will let them; three more are poor whites whose interests are clearly with us and against their would-be masters. How long will it be before the avowals of their masters, aided by the suffering of the war, will open their eyes?

This leaves one million, of all ages and sexes, who, through owning slaves and connection with slaveholders, may think they have a class interest in the success of the rebellion. This class we can crush out— or what will be left of them after the war debt of the rebels reaches its proper value — whenever we can divide the four million of poor whites, by an operation upon their eyes!

But if I underrate the difficulty, the necessity for doing it now is all the greater! If hard now, how much harder will it be after we shall have, as you desire, permitted them to separate. Now they have no manufactures, no foreign alliances, no warlike stores except what they stole from us, and these rapidly diminishing. They have missed their first spring in which lies the strength of a conspiracy; while our cold Anglo-Saxon blood is just getting roused from the lethargy of a long peace and of overmuch prosperity. We are just ready to begin to fight. We all feel that what is now a war between the people and a small class would, after a separation, become a war of sections. As for peace, nobody believes it possible; a truce we might have, to give them time to gather breath! It is only a question between war to the end now and a chronic state of war with two standing armies, two navies, two corps of diplomatists seeking alliances in every court in Europe, to end in another death struggle. There is no peace for us, unless we either conquer the arrogant slave-owner classes who have so long ruled us and bullied you, or permit them by a compromise to continue and extend their combination with our baser class and to drag us into a grand slave empire which shall absorb the West Indies and Mexico and Central America.

A bold stand at the polls by the North in 1850 would have given us the victory peacefully; now we must fight for it, or yield to the basest faction that ever ruled a country. Better a ten years' war than this; but it will not be a long war.

The conspirators counted upon an early success in arms and a division of the North. Foiled in this, their only hope is in foreign intervention. I have no doubt what you tell me is true of Louis Napoleon, still less that he secretly gave the rebels hopes of aid, nor that they have construed your course to favor them. Had you squarely taken the same ground that we did towards your Canadian rebels, this hope would have been extinguished; and now, if you want cotton, if you want trade, if you want to pave the way to a real alliance with the only free nation besides yourselves on the globe, you ought to help us in all legitimate ways. You should encourage our loan, you should sharpen your police to detect the outfit of hostile vessels, you should hold the Nashville strictly accountable for her acts of pillage and destruction, giving her the experience of a long trial in your courts, if only to discourage other pirates from being their own judges of what property they may appropriate.

Do this and the war will be short. Four months ago an offer from you to do what we should have readily done when your Indian empire was threatened, had it seemed necessary or proper, would have ended the war before this, — namely, to throw open to us for purchase your armories and your ironclad shipyards. We might not have accepted the offer, but it would have destroyed the rebels' last hope. I don't complain of your not doing it, but simply indicate what for the sake of both countries I wish might have been your policy!

As for the Sault Ste. Marie, the pine lands must wait for the prairie farmers to build again; but the developments in our mineral lands are said to be magnificent, and to promise results next summer.

Very truly yours,

J. M. Forbes.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 253-7

Diary of William Howard Russell: March 25, 1861

I had an invitation to meet several members of the New York press association at breakfast. Among the company were — Mr. Bayard Taylor, with whose extensive notes of travel his countrymen are familiar — a kind of enlarged Inglis, full of the genial spirit which makes travelling in company so agreeable, but he has come back as travellers generally do, satisfied there is no country like his own — Prince Leeboo loved his own isle the best after all — Mr. Raymond, of the “New York Times” (formerly Lieutenant-Governor of the State); Mr. Olmsted, the indefatigable, able, and earnest writer, whom to describe simply as an Abolitionist would be to confound with ignorant if zealous, unphilosophical, and impracticable men; Mr. Dana, of the “Tribune;” Mr. Hurlbut, of the “Times;” the Editor of the “Courier des Etats Unis;” Mr. Young, of the “Albion,” which is the only English journal published in the States; and others. There was a good deal of pleasant conversation, though every one differed with his neighbor, as a matter of course, as soon as he touched on politics. There was talk de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, such as Heenan and Sayers, Secession and Sumter, the press, politicians, New York life, and so on. The first topic occupied a larger place than it was entitled to, because in all likelihood the sporting editor of one of the papers who was present expressed, perhaps, some justifiable feeling in reference to the refusal of the belt to the American. All admitted the courage and great endurance of his antagonist, but seemed convinced that Heenan, if not the better man, was at least the victor in that particular contest. It would be strange to see the great tendency of Americans to institute comparisons with ancient and recognized standards, if it were not that they are adopting the natural mode of judging of their own capabilities. The nation is like a growing lad who is constantly testing his powers in competition with his elders. He is in his youth and nonage, and he is calling down the lanes and alleys to all comers to look at his muscle, to run against or to fight him. It is a sign of youth, not a proof of weakness, though it does offend the old hands and vex the veterans.

Then one finds that Great Britain is often treated very much as an old Peninsula man may be by a set of young soldiers at a club. He is no doubt a very gallant fellow, and has done very fine things in his day, and he is listened to with respectful endurance, but there is a secret belief that he will never do anything very great again.

One of the gentlemen present said that England might dispute the right of the United States Government to blockade the ports of her own States, to which she was entitled to access under treaty, and might urge that such a blockade was not justifiable; but then, it was argued, that the President could open and shut ports as he pleased; and that he might close the Southern ports by a proclamation in the nature of an Order of Council. It was taken for granted that Great Britain would only act on sordid motives, but that the well known affection of France for the United States is to check the selfishness of her rival, and prevent a speedy recognition.

SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 28-9