The Release of the Chapman Pirates: A California Sidelight on Lincoln's Amnesty Policy

THE RELEASE OF THE CHAPMAN PIRATES: A California Sidelight on Lincoln's Amnesty Policy Robert J. Chandler President Abraham Lincoln primarily had the South in mind when he proclaimed amnesty December 8, 1863. He offered "a full pardon" to "all persons who have, directly or by implication, participated in the existing rebellion," excepting high-ranking Confederate civil and military officers and certain other classes, who "shall take and subscribe an oath" to henceforth support the United States.1 He wished to weaken the Confederates' will to fight by encouraging desertion from their armies and to promote reconstruction governments, particularly in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennesse . The New York Post praised this proclamation as "another evidence of the care with which the President studies the wishes of the people. His Proclamation is framed to meet the interests and opinions of the Union men of the States affected by it."2 The proclamation had unforeseen effects in the North. Within a week of its issuance, Congressman Fernando Wood, a Peace Democrat from New York City, sought Lincoln's opinion as to whether it applied to Northern sympathizers with the rebellion, while CaIifomians warned Lincoln that it would free three convicted and imprisoned Confederate sympathizers in San Francisco, who had attempted to convert the schooner /. M. Chapman into a commerce raider. The Chapman case, through repeated warnings and discussions with the President, became central for much of Lincoln's Northern amnesty program, and provided Congressman Wood with his answer. Jonathan T. Dorris, with his emphasis on the legal workings of amnesty in his definitive Pardon and Amnesty under Lincoln and Johnson, touches on, but does not develop the importance of this case. Richard Current, in his masterful The Lincoln Nobody Knows, states that from the first Lincoln felt that his amnesty had "a comparatively limited scope," and did not apply to anyone "already 1 Roy P. Basler (ed.), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953-1955), VII, 53-6. 2 Quoted in Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, (New York, 1939), II, 494-5. 129 130civil war history convicted of a crime." Both Dorris and Current argue that the release of the Chapman pirates under the provisions of the first proclamation caused the President to issue a second limiting proclamation March 26, 1864, withdrawing amnesty from all who had been arrested or convicted for aiding the enemy.3 The story of Lincoln's amnesty program is more complex than either Dorris or Current suggest. Lincoln gave no explanations for his developing policy, but at first he restricted amnesty, as he told Congress, to those who "voluntarily" took the oath.4 The Chapman case, it appears, broadened his amnesty to include those on trial, and those already convicted. Radical Republican attack probably caused him to curtail his amnesty to his original views. Lincoln's shifting policy had its effect in California. In spite of the Post's praise of the President as a master of public opinion, California reaction was not what he would have wished. The release of the Chapman pirates ran counter to Union sentiment, and contributed to a weakening respect for civil law and an increased reliance on arbitrary military arrests. The Chapman affair burst upon San Francisco March 15, 1863, when customs officials boarded the schooner J. M. Chapman before it could leave the harbor on a privateering voyage and captured all twenty Southern sympathizers on board. This expedition had its genesis in the fertile imagination of Ashbury Harpending, a twenty-two-year-old Kentuckian given to mining and mercantile schemes. By February 1862, he had conceived a plan to outfit a small ship and seize one of the tri-monthly mail steamers carrying California gold to the East and convert it into a rebel cruiser. In mid-May 1862, while returning to California on the steamer with a Confederate letter of marque, Harpending met Ridgely Greathouse and Alfred Rubery, who became his allies in adventure. The thirty-year-old Greathouse, who was also a Kentuckian, engaged in banking, merchandising, and staging in Yreka, California, with two older brothers. He provided the capital for the enterprise. Rubery, a twenty-year-old native of Birmingham, England, was...