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to your requisition for troops from Arkansas to subjugate the Southern States, I have to say that none will be furnished.
The demand is only adding insult to injury.
The people of this Commonwealth are freemen, not slaves, and will defend, to the last extremity, their honor, their lives, and property, against Northern mendacity and usurpation.”
Governor Jackson, of Missouri, responded:--“There can be, I apprehend, no doubt that these men are intended to make war upon the seceded States.
Your requisition, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its objects, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with.
Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on such an unholy crusade.”
There is such a coincidence of sentiment and language in the responses of the disloyal governors, that the conviction is pressed upon the reader that the conclave of conspirators at Montgomery was the common source of their inspiration.
Governor Hicks, of Maryland, appalled by the presence of great dangers, and sorely pressed by the secessionists on every side, hastened, in a proclamation, to assure the people of his State that no troops would be sent from Maryland unless it might be for the defense of the National Capital, and that they (the people) would, in a short time, “have the opportunity afforded them, in a special election for members of the Congress of the United States, to express their devotion to the Union, or their desire to see it broken up.”
Governor Burton, of Delaware, made no response until the 26th, when he informed the President that he had no authority to comply with his requisition.
At the same time he recommended the formation of volunteer companies for the protection of the citizens and property of Delaware, and not for the preservation of the Union.
The Governor would thereby control a large militia force.
How he would have employed it, had occasion required, was manifested by his steady refusal, while in office, to assist the National Government in its struggle with its enemies.
In the seven excepted Slave-labor States in which insurrection prevailed, the proclamation and the requisition produced hot indignation, and were assailed with the bitterest scorn.
Not in these States alone, but in the border Slave-labor States, and even in the Free-labor States, there were vehement opposers of the war policy of the Government from its inception.1 One of the most influential newspapers printed west of the Alleghanies, which had opposed secession valiantly, step by step, with the keen cimeter of wit and the solid shot of argument, and professed to be then, and throughout the war, devoted to the cause of the Union, hurled back the proclamation,
1 The utterances of two of the leading newspapers in the city of New York, whose principal editors were afterward elected to the National Congress, gave fair specimens of the tone of a portion of the Northern press at that time. The New York Express said:--“The South can never be subjugated by the North, nor can any marked successes be achieved against them. They have us at every advantage. They fight upon their own soil, in behalf of their dearest rights — for their public institutions, their homes, and their property. . . . The South. in self-preservation, has been driven to the wall, and forced to proclaim its independence. A servile insurrection and wholesale slaughter of the whites will alone satisfy the murderous designs of the Abolitionists. The Administration, egged on by the halloo of the Black Republican organs of this city, has sent its mercenary forces to pick a quarrel and initiate the work of desolation and ruin. A call is made for an army of volunteers, under the pretense that an invasion is apprehended of the Federal Capital; and the next step will be to summon the slave population to revolt and massacre.”
The New York Daily News, assuming to be the organ of the Democratic party, said :--“Let not this perfidious Administration invoke the sacred names of the Union and the Constitution, in the hope of cheating fools into the support of the war which it has begun. . . . He is no Democrat who will enter the Army, or volunteer to aid this diabolical policy of civil war.” These utterances found echoes .in many places. We may notice here only one, that of a newspaper published in Bangor, Maine. After declaring that the South Carolinians were simply imitators of the Fathers of the Republic, it said :--“When the Government at Washington calls for volunteers to carry on the work of subjugation and tyranny, under the specious phrases of ‘enforcing the laws,’ retaking and ‘protecting the public property,’ and collecting the revenue, let every Democrat fold his arms and bid the minions of Tory despotism do a Tory despot's work.” --Quoted by Whitney in his History of the War for the Preservation of the Federal Union, i. 313.
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