May 2, 1864> |
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States at the end of a long, expensive, and desolating war, and to no good purpose; and, 4th, to “say to the seceded States, ‘Wayward sisters, go in peace!’
” 1
Another earnest pleader against “coercion,” which would evidently lead to war, was Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, who gave intellectual power to the electro-magnetic telegraph.
He was a conspicuous opponent of the war measures of the Government during the entire conflict.
He was made President, as we have seen, of “The American Society for the Promotion of National Union,” immediately after the adjournment of the Peace Convention;2 and he worked zealously for the promotion of measures that might satisfy the demands of the slaveholders.
“Before that most lamentable and pregnant error of the attack on Fort Sumter had been committed,” says Professor Morse, in a letter to the author of these pages,
which, indeed, inaugurated actual physical hostilities, and while war was confined to threatening and irritating words between the two sections of the country, there seemed to me to be two methods by which our sectional difficulties might be adjusted without bloodshed, which methods I thus stated in a paper drawn up at the time, when the project of a Flag for the Southern section was under discussion in the journals of the South:--
“The first and most proper mode of adjusting those difficulties is to call a National Convention, in conformity with the provisions of the Constitution; a Convention of the States, to which body should be referred the whole subject of our differences; and then, if but a moiety of the lofty, unselfish, ”
1 This letter, written by the General-in-chief of the Armies of the Republic, on whose advice and skill the incoming President must rely for the support of the integrity of the nation and the vindication of the laws, at all hazards, is so remarkable, under the circumstances, that its suggestions are given here in full, as follows:--
On the solicitation of John Van Buren, of New York, General Scott gave him the original draft of this letter, as an autographic keepsake of a strictly private nature, supposing that he was simply gratifying the wishes of an honorable man. His confidence was betrayed, and this private letter to Mr. Seward was read to a large public meeting of the friends of Horatio Seymour, during the canvass of that leader for the office of Governor of New York. The letter was used as an implied censure of the policy of the Administration of Mr. Lincoln. General Scott, in vindication of himself, then published a Report on the public defenses, which he had submitted to Mr. Buchanan before he left office, which occasioned a spicy newspaper correspondence between these venerable men. See National Intelligencer, October, 1862.To meet the extraordinary exigencies of the times, it seems to me that I am guilty of no arrogance in limiting the President's field of selection to one of the four plans of procedure subjoined:--
I. Throw off the old and assume a new designation — the Union Party; adopt the conciliatory measures proposed by Mr. Crittenden, or the Peace Convention, and, my life upon it, we shall have no new case of secession; but, on the contrary, an early return of many, if not all the States which have already broken off from the Union. Without some equally benign measure, the remaining Slaveholding States will probably join the Montgomery Confederacy in less than sixty days--when this city [Washington], being included in a foreign country, would require a permanent garrison of at least thirty-five thousand troops to protect the Government within it. II. Collect the duties on foreign goods outside the ports of which this Government has lost the command, or close such ports by act of Congress, and blockade them. III. Conquer the seceded States by invading armies. No doubt this might be done in two or three years, by a young and able general — a Wolfe, a Desaix, or a Hoche — with three hundred thousand disciplined men (kept up to that number), estimating a third for garrisons, and the loss of a yet greater number by skirmishes, sieges, battles, and Southern fevers. The destruction of life and property on the other side would be frightful, however perfect the moral discipline of the invaders. The conquest completed, at that enormous waste of human life to the North and Northwest, with at least two hundred and fifty millions of dollars added thereto, and cui bono? Fifteen desolated Provinces! not to be brought into harmony with their conquerors, to be held for generations by heavy garrisons, at an expense quadruple the net duties or taxes which it would be possible to extort from them, followed by a Protector or Emperor. IV. Say to the seceded States--Wayward sisters, depart in peace!--Scott's Autobiography, II. 625.
2 See page 207.
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