Illinois's War: The Civil War in Documents

Five: Divided Houses

 five v Divided Houses The year 1863 was a whirlwind of breathtaking losses and stirring victories, of bitter division and violence on the home front, and yet more grievous casualties on blood-soaked fields of battle. The Union’s new strategy of emancipation—and its adjunct, the enlistment of black troops—both elevated the stakes and purpose of the war and produced determined opposition. Spring saw Grant’s campaign for Vicksburg stall, and Lee’s uncanny victory at Chancellorsville. Next came another of Lee’s bold gambits: a risky offensive into central Pennsylvania. The Union’s controversial draft law sparked intense and violent resistance. That resistance, the work of Peace Democrats—or copperheads, as the Republicans derisively labeled them—continued even after July’s dramatic reversal of military fortunes: Grant’s victory at Vicksburg and Meade’s crushing defeat of Lee’s army at Gettysburg. Against this backdrop Illinoisans divided as never before. Democrats had swept into office on hostility to Lincoln’s wartime policies. Yet while Democrats were united in their opposition to Lincoln and his “black Republican” allies, they also faced serious problems. It was one thing to find fault with specific policies, quite another to offer a strategic alternative for winning the war. By 1863 two distinct Democratic factions emerged and harmonizing them proved difficult. War Democrats , harking back to Stephen Douglas’s example, urged prosecution of the war and restoration of the Union, even as they opposed Republican means to that end. Peace Democrats called for armistice and negotiation with the Confederacy; more than a few seemed to openly hold pro-Confederate sympathies. Copperheadism attracted support across the Union, but Illinois’s movement was arguably the largest and potentially most destabilizing of any state because it encompassed both a legitimate political arm capable of delivering votes and policies and a paramilitary element capable of visiting violence on loyal communities. When the 1863 legislative session opened, Democrats wasted little time exercising their newfound political power. The general assembly sent Congressman William Richardson to fill Orville Browning’s Senate seat. The Quincy Democrat was a fiery critic of emancipation and a voice for the state’s antiwar faction. A house committee drafted a habeas corpus law intended to stop military authorities from arresting Illinois civilians—in effect, nullifying federal law. Though never  illinois’s war enacted, this bill was a response to the military arrests of Congressman William J. Allen and other prominent Democrats carried out in the fall of 1862. But the most striking product of the 1863 general assembly was the so-called Peace Resolutions bill passed by the house in February. The resolutions indicted Republican wartime policies, called for an armistice with the South, and recommended a committee of six to help organize a peace convention in Louisville, Kentucky. Only a Republican filibuster in the senate thwarted passage of these explosive resolutions. The general assembly then moved forward with proposals that would give it and the Democratic state treasurer more power over wartime expenditures, a direct challenge to the authority of Governor Yates. Clearly Democrats were bidding fair to take control of Illinois’s war. In June, Yates counterpunched. The governor seized on a technicality—a disagreement between the house and senate over the date of adjournment—to prorogue (literally, to discontinue) the general assembly. This was an unprecedented assertion of executive power over the legislative branch, the first such example in the state’s history. While the order itself involved technical constitutional issues of executive authority and legislative prerogative (ultimately Yates’s order was upheld by the Illinois Supreme Court), Yates’s battle with the Democratic assembly was fundamentally a political struggle over wartime policy. The federal draft was another flashpoint of conflict between Republicans and Democrats when Congress enacted the Enrollment Act earlier that spring. In authorizing a draft, Congress was responding to sagging levels of volunteerism, compounded by the growing problem of desertion in the Union army. Both problems were symptoms of low morale, but in Illinois—which recorded more than thirteen thousand desertions throughout the war—desertion was, according to one historian, most numerous “in the months following emancipation, the arming of Negroes, and the military reverses of 1862.”1 The new federal law empowered U.S. provost marshals to canvass every congressional district in the Union and enroll all able-bodied males aged eighteen to forty-five, who would then be eligible for a lottery draft. Congress intended the Enrollment Act as a stimulus to further volunteering; each state was...