A biographical history of eminent and self-made men of the state of Indiana : with many portrait-illustrations on steel, engraved expressly for this work, Volume I, Part 103

Author:
Publication date: 1880
Publisher: Cincinnati, Ohio : Western Biographical Publishing Co.
Number of Pages: 1038

USA > Indiana > A biographical history of eminent and self-made men of the state of Indiana : with many portrait-illustrations on steel, engraved expressly for this work, Volume I > Part 103

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" Having said this much, I ought, perhaps, to say no more. But a part of the press North, and the press South, have made yet another word proper and necessary. You should know that General Garnett was not killed by as- sassins, in violation of the rules of civilized warfare, but by Christian soldiers, in defense of their own lives and the lives of their officers, who must have fallen if General Garnett had succeeded in rallying his men for another fire. It is not true that General Garnet had a white hand- kerchief in his hand, which he waved in token of his desire to surrender. He had no handkerchief, nor any thing else in his hand, and was seemingly intent on rallying his forces for another volley. Had he had any white handkerchief or other handkerchief about him, I need not have borrowed one from a private soldier, as I did, to tie up his jaws, when closing his eyes and mouth. All charges of unkindness to the deceased, or of any parade over his remains or property, are simply heartless slanders against a courteous and piteous charity, that forgot the enemy in the man, and wept for his untimely fate."

Major Gordon had occasion to be comforted by what followed hard upon this attack of the press upon him ; for the same papers that assailed him, for his courtesy to a fallen foe, as if he had been a thief and robber, within less than thirty days after doing so published without censu e the fact that a brother of General Cameron, who fell in the battle of Bull Run, had been

stripped of his arms, watch, and seven hundred dollars in gold coin, which were taken South, and paraded in public as legitimate spoils of war, by the enemies of the govern- ment. And still later, during the same year, the same press found nothing worthy of condemnation, or censure even, in the unfeeling and brutal letter of General Beau- regard to Colonel Cameron's sister, Mrs. Evans, who asked permission to enter his lines and remove her brother's remains to friendly soil. We are left to be- lieve, from this discrimination, that, if it had been as safe to shoot as it was to lie against the soldiers of the Union, these Northern editors would have found their proper place in the Southern army. And this ought to content Major Gordon as long as he lives. During the early days of secession there were nowhere in the coun- try any very definite notions concerning the predic- aments that might arise from it. The men of the South who advocated it did, indeed, regard it as capable of giving rise in each seceding state, at once, to an inde- pendent nation. That much was settled in their judg- ment, and they saw nothing beyond that worthy of consideration. The national administration, on the other hand, had no definite views on the subject. Pres- ident Buchanan seemed to regard secession as an act of the state so far legal as to make any attempt on the part of the government to prevent it by force unlawful; for he declared that the government had no authority to coerce a state. Others, admitting that the Constitution did, indeed, afford footing for coercion, opposed it on the ground that, inasmuch as our system of government was throughout founded in the consent of the governed, coercion was a contradiction of its fundamental idea, which must perish as soon as coercion was resorted to. Still others desired to let the Southern States go, in the belief that a short trial would satisfy them of the utter impracticability of maintaining a separate national exist- ence with the institution of slavery; and that they would soon tire of the experiment, and, humiliated and chas- tised for making it, come back to the Union again, when we could make their abandonment of slavery a condition of their readmission. And, finally, there was a very large class who believed that the Constitution authorized and required those in control of the govern- ment to maintain the integrity of the Union at all haz- ards, and at whatever cost. Yet even these had not looked far beyond this simple and to them manifest duty, to find a theory broad enough to embrace and support all the measures to which the great emergency might require them to resort. Mr. Lincoln, when the crisis finally came, and he was driven to act with refer- ence to it, talked weakly enough of being compelled to violate some of the provisions of the Constitution in order to preserve the rest. In this conflict and confu- sion of opinions Major Gordon was not without views, and, while serving in the army in West Virginia, did not

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withhold them from his friends or the public. He wrote an elaborate essay on the legal predicaments- actual and prospective-which secession and rebellion had placed, or might place, before the country and the government, and gave it to a member of the conven- tion that assembled during the early summer of 1861 at Wheeling. In this paper he denied the right of a state or of its people to pass any valid act of secession. He asserted the right of the people of a state, on the other hand, to abolish its government, or repeal any provi- sion of its Constitution. In view of this denial of the power of the people of a state to secede, on the one hand, and this assertion of power, on the other, to mod- ify or abolish their government, he proceeded to set forth and discuss the several predicaments which the action of the people of the seceding states had rendered it proper for the government to consider, with reference to the final settlement of all questions that secession and rebellion had initiated as possibilities of the future. In his judgment it was a matter of importance to thus invent a scheme of categories involved in the situa- tion, which, while it should be exhaustive on the one hand, would on the other, at the same time, furnish the government, upon every one of them, a solid footing in reason and law for complete authority to do all that might, in any contingency, become necessary to be done to preserve, reconstruct, and maintain a government in each of the states whose people had seceded. He main- tained that these categories were three only, namely: I. Secession operated as a complete dissolution of the Union so far as the state was concerned whose people re- sorted to it, and they thereby became an independent na- tion. 2. Secession was so far potent as to abolish the Con- stitution of the state whose people adopted it, and so to leave it and them without any state government which the nation could recognize; but was impotent so far as removing them from the jurisdiction of the national au- thority was concerned. In other words, secession simply reduced the state and people adopting it to a territorial condition; or, 3. Secession so far impaired the Consti- tution of the state whose people adopted it as to ren- der its government no longer a republican government, within the meaning of the national Constitution, but left the state and its people still within the Union, and sub- ject to its authority to guarantee to each state a repub- lican government. These categories, it was insisted, were exhaustive, and upon each the plenary authority of the nation was maintained, to do all that might be necessary in subjugating the seceders; and, when that was accomplished, in reconstructing and guaranteeing republican governments wherever they had been abol- ished or impaired by secession or rebellion. Subsequent to the war, when Congress had resorted, in the exercise of its authority, to many measures not of the clearest wisdom or efficiency, for the reconstruction of these |

governments, Major Gordon, who never justified the pol- icy of many of these measures, was always able, upon these categories, successfully to maintain their constitution- ality. In the political contest of 1868 his ablest speeches stood upon these grounds, which he had adopted in the earliest days of secession. It is worthy of note that he submitted his views on the subject to Doctor Francis Lieber and Hon. Charles Sumner, at the same time, in September, 1861, and had the full approval of the former. The latter objected to them at the time, but finally adopted the second of the categories, as his action in Congress shows; but it is believed that he did not sup- port it with his usual ability, or the best argument that can be made in favor of it. At all events, it was never adopted by the government, and for the time passed out of sight. He remained in Boston nearly three months, part of the time in Fort Independence, and part of the time as mustering and disbursing officer for Massachusetts. He was then ordered to Indiana to re- cruit a battalion of his regiment. Arriving at Indian- apolis late in November, 1861, he entered at once upon his new duties with energy and success. His labors were, however, soon sadly interrupted by the death of his only son, Joseph R. T. Gordon, a beautiful and talented youth of seventeen years, who was killed in battle in West Virginia, December 13, 1861. The blow almost killed his father, and he has never yet wholly recovered from it. He had built all his hopes upon the life and career of his son, and even his enlistment was a sad affliction to him. Yet he could not, consist- ently with his sense of duty to his country, demand his discharge. On the contrary, while, as he said, he "would sooner have died than that he should have thrown away the season of life wherein alone men can prepare themselves for usefulness and greatness;" yet, after he had once enlisted, "he would sooner die than that he should do any unworthy act in his new vocation to bring reproach upon himself or family." To his father's letter touching his enlistment, his answer did not come until after his death, and even then it was, like his own life, incomplete. It contained enough, however, to show that he fully comprehended the no- blest grounds of his action, and fully to justify the sac- rifice. He said :

" When you have endeavored, ever since I was old enough to understand you, to instruct me, not only by precept, but by example, that I was to prefer freedom to every thing else in this world; and that I should not hesitate to sacrifice any thing, even life itself, on the altar of my country, when required, you surely should not be surprised that I should, in this hour of extreme peril to my country, offer her my feeble aid."

This clear statement of his lofty and pure motives was a chief source of consolation to his father in the midst of his great desolation. In May, 1862, Major Gordon was ordered to Fort Independence, to superin-

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tend the recruitment and organization of his regiment, and remained on that duty for about fifteen months. During this time he had some leisure, which enabled him to bestow study and thought upon the daily situ- ation of the country and the operations of the armies contending to destroy and save it. He wrote several letters touching the best method of conducting the war to members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, in some of which he urged the policy of concen- trating our forces into three or four great armies, pene- trating the Confederacy at points indicated, and march- ing simultaneously upon parallel lines to the sea. One of these lines was the same which was finally adopted by General Sherman two years later. The only differ- ence in the advance he proposed and that ultimately made was, that the lines should be kept open and com- munication maintained with their base. This was to be done by collecting the slaves along each line, erecting the necessary fortifications to protect it by means of their labor, and organizing and arming them for their defense. These letters are still extant, but they were unfortunate in being written too soon, by an obscure man, who lacked both experience and position as a soldier, and maintained views in advance of those both of Congress and the President, who were still striving to save slavery and the Union. Having lost his first wife, he had married Miss Julia L. Dumont in 1862, a daughter of General E. Dumont, and took his family to Boston. In July, 1863, the draft riots broke out in New York and Boston, but while the former city suffered greatly in its good name and the lives and property of its citizens, the latter passed through the trial without serious loss, and with increased character for public spirit and patriotism. The difference was chiefly owing to the men at the head of the state and city govern- ment of the two states and cities, and the prompt energy with which the military, both regular and vol- unteer, supported those of Boston and Massachusetts. Major Gordon, with two companies, was the first to re- port to the Governor of Massachusetts, arriving at the state capital from Fort Independence in less than forty minutes after receiving his excellency's request for as- sistance. The mob was promptly suppressed by a single discharge of canister from a twelve-pounder Napoleon, and it was never renewed. Major Gordon, among others, received the thanks both of the city and state governments for the part he took in these operations. Almost immediately after the riot, which took place July 14, 1863, he was ordered to the field to take com- mand of his regiment, and within a few days thereafter left the fort in obedience to the order. He met his regiment, however, in the city of New York, and, as- suming command of it there, remained with it until the completion of the draft in that state. About the middle of September he went with it to the front,

where he participated in the very active and unsatisfac- tory maneuvers of the Army of the Potomac, until the campaign of Mine Run closed its operations for the winter. His career as a soldier was inconspicuous, but it is safe to say that he so filled his place as to win the confidence of those with and under whom he served, and contributed to lighten some of the burdens that bore heavily upon the shoulders of enlisted men. Among these burdens was one resulting from a general order, published April 13, 1863, which required the men to carry eight days' rations when on the march. He soon discovered that the order was the cause of a great and wasteful oppression, five rations and more out of every twenty being lost by means of it, while the army suffered in health, life, and general efficiency as its direct consequence. He set on foot a system of ob- servation which soon placed him in possession of the necessary facts wherewith to attack it effectively. This he did in a clear and forcible communication ad- dressed to the headquarters of the army. Out of this letter grew an immediate rescinding of the order. He found company officers in the habit of punishing enlisted men for petty offenses without trial, when he joined the army. This was done on the pretext that there could be no field officer's court in most of the regular regiments, because they were with- out field officers, captains acting as such; and that a captain was incompetent to hold such a court under the act of Congress providing for such courts-martial. He called the attention of headquar- ters to the matter, and asked a construction of the act. His letter was forwarded to the War Department, and referred to the Judge Advocate-general, who gave the act a construction which enabled every regiment to have its field officer's court-martial, and so made all arbitrary punishments entirely unnecessary. The opin- ion of the Judge Advocate-general, founded on Major Gordon's letter, was published as part of the first gen- eral order of the headquarters of the Army of the Poto- mac for 1864. Major Gordon soon found his pay entirely inadequate to support himself in the field and his family at home; and, after having gone into debt until there seemed little hope of ever getting out again, he tendered his resignation, which the President was pleased to ac- cept, March 4, 1864. He returned immediately to the West, and the twenty-ninth day of March opened a law office at the capital of the state. Notwithstanding the opposition of the head of the state government (and it was constantly manifested against him), his suc- cess was prompt and abundant. But he found himself in the midst of a new order of social and political life, for which he was not prepared, and to which every sentiment and principle that he cherished was opposed. His party, through its leaders, spoke and acted as the people, and arrogated to itself all the attributes of the

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people. All the rest were treated as public enemies or their allies, and almost every day and night soldiers spoke and others heard doctrines that would have jus- tified them in treating as traitors all who dissented from the party. Military bands and drum-corps in the pay of the government were used to rally the party cohorts, whilst soldiers daily swelled the ranks of party proces- sions. Any thing like fair or equal political discussion was at an end; spies invaded all the sanctuaries of private life, and endangered the honest intercourse of private friendship. The whole order of things was hateful, and Major Gordon was glad to find a way opened to him, by the German Republicans of the city, whereby free speech might, in some small measure, be resumed and vindicated. They held a convention to send delegates to the Cleveland convention, and he united with them in the enterprise; and, when that body nominated Generals Fremont and Cochran for President and Vice-president, he warmly supported them. He made two speeches, in which he severely criticised the spirit of the dominant party, and some of the measures of the national administration and state government. These had a wide circulation, but their chief result was to excite intense hatred and abuse of the speaker. Never was any man more bitterly de- nounced by the Republican press than he; but he met its denunciation with scorn. All the good effects that he had hoped would follow his efforts were entirely de- feated by the spirit of party. The Democrats, on the one hand, persisted in a course that indicated a desire to encourage the Confederacy in resistance of the gov- ernment; and the Republicans showed, by their con- duct, on the other, that they did not believe that their adversaries had any rights under a Constitution which they seemed willing to see perish. Finally, however, Mr. Lincoln retired Mr. Blair from his cabinet; the nominees of the Cleveland convention withdrew from the contest, and their friends earnestly supported Mr. Lincoln. In the four years that followed, both parties changed ground in respect to some important measures. In 1864 the Democrats were the advocates of congres- sional reconstruction of the governments of the states of the Confederacy ; and the Republicans its opponents, and the advocates of presidential reconstruction. Major Gordon then stood with the former upon the question. Two years later the Democrats were in favor of presi- dential reconstruction, and the Republicans equally zealous for congressional. Major Gordon stood still on the question, and was denounced as a turn-coat by both. His political action has, ever since 1864, been entirely independent ; and, although he has almost uniformly voted and acted with the Republican party, yet he has never failed to condemn its faults. Had there been at any time, in his opinion, a better party that had any good ground to hope for success, he would have sup-

ported it; but, in his judgment, there has been none. He regarded its treatment of President Johnson as flatly unjust, in many respects unconstitutional, and in none more so than in the attempt to impeach and remove him from his high position. The means resorted to to secure his conviction were, in his judgment, disgraceful in the highest degree to Congress and the country; and he did not fail to denounce them, as dangerous, if not entirely subversive of the principles of republican lib- erty. It was in a speech on this occasion that he gave utterance to his views of the spirit in which the pacifi- cation and restoration of the union could be finally ac- complished. He is reported as having closed thus :

" A word more, and he had done. Ancient Greece had shown us the way to restore the union of our country, and make it a blessing instead of a curse. The states of Greece were once united in the Amphictyonic Council, which exercised a kind of general authority over them all. Nevertheless, their peace was often disturbed by internal wars between the states. From the very nature of their civilization, and the nature of the bond by which they were united, this was unavoid- able. But when the strife was at an end they were wiser, and, although they knew not Christianity, were yet more Christian than we. The victorious party was not allowed to erect any trophy, to build any monu- ment upon the field of its triumph, of any material more durable than wood. And Puffendorf, delivering the law of nature and of nations on the subject, has ob- served : 'The remembrance of enmities and contentions ought, as soon as possible, to be defaced out of our minds. On this account, as we find the story in Tully, the Thebans were accused in the general diet or council of Greece, for setting up a brazen trophy over the Lacedæmonians, inasmuch as it did not become one Grecian state to fix an eternal monument of their quar- rel with another. For it seems their custom was to raise their trophies only of wood, to prevent their long and reproachful countenance.' He would commend that lesson to the study of those to whom the recon- struction of the country was committed. He thanked God it had always been accepted by himself, even in the darkest hour of his own and the country's affliction. Never had he felt for a moment the slightest emotion of anger, resentment, or revenge toward the people of the South. He believed they had committed a grievous wrong against the best government in the world, by assailing the Union, and attempting to break it up and destroy it. For that it was necessary to put them down by the strong arm to which they had appealed. He did not doubt, however, that the great masses of the South- ern people were as honest in their belief in the justice of their cause, and the patriotism of their course, as the people of the North. On the field of battle he had seen the soldier of the Union and the soldier of the Confederacy dying side by side, and heard them both thank God, who permitted them to die for the liberty of their country. He had felt at such times that there must have been some great mistake somewhere ; but he had never doubted the sincerity of those mutual victims of that mistake, nor that their souls had ascended to- gether from the fields of strife to the field of the blessed, there to dwell forever in the light of reconcil- iation and love. As there, so here, love must become the means of restoring the Union, the prosperity and

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peace of our country. That great work could never be accomplished by cherishing mutual hatred and revenge, by erecting monuments to the wrongs we had inflicted or suffered, by displaying trophies that bear witness to the barbarities of the contest waged against the dear old flag and Constitution. All these were evil, only evil, leading to still worse evil. He would remove from the trophy-room, yonder in the State-house, that cruel black flag, with its horrible 'raw head and bloody bones,' and he would destroy it from the face of the earth. He would do so for the honor of his country, if there were no mistaken inimical countrymen to con- ciliate. If his country was passing off the theater of national existence forever, he would destroy it, out of respect for its memory and for mankind. Hateful me- mento of a bad heart and a bad cause, it should go straight to oblivion, and the sooner the better. And so of whatever else might tend to keep alive the spirit of strife, now suppressed but not wholly extinguished, between the North and the South. He would not, however, deny to the friends of either the sacred right to honor the gallant dead. No; let them go together to every battle-field where the bleaching bones of the common dead bear witness to their mutual strife and slaughter, and with mutual hands cover and heal the common grave 'with the sweet oblivion of flowers;' and there, too, let the monument that they build become a temple of mutual forgiveness, reconciliation, and broth- erly love."

The action of Democrats and the Democratic party, however, in 1868, left him without any ground to hope, as he thought, for any advantage to the country by its success ; and he, consequently, acted earnestly with the Republicans. He did so because he believed that the election of Seymour and Blair would have destroyed, or, at least, greatly impaired, the value of the victory gained by Union arms over the principle and the friends of secession, and would, not improbably, jeopardize the peace of the country. He took part in the contest, and his speeches had a wide circulation through the press. It was in this canvass that he used his theory of the conse- quences of secession to a state government, as the basis of an argument that has never been answered, to maintain that however bad in policy the Republican measures of reconstruction might be, they were, nevertheless, clearly not unconstitutional. In 1872 he felt it his duty as a citizen to be on the same side; and, being chosen by the party as a candidate for elector for the state at large, he made a zealous canvass of most of the counties of the state. Two of his speeches attracted considerable attention at the time, and had a wide circulation. One of these presented the relations, past and present, of the Democratic party and its candidate in a strong light, and humorously and effectively ridiculed both. The other was a review of the political life and meth- ods of Mr. Hendricks. This speech had the fortune to be substantially copied by some correspondent of the New York Times in 1876, when Mr. Hendricks was a candidate for Vice-president, and so got a national cir- culation, but without its author's name. He was chosen

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A biographical history of eminent and self-made men of the state of Indiana : with many portrait-illustrations on steel, engraved expressly for this work, Volume I, Part 103

Author: Publication date: 1880 Publisher: Cincinnati, Ohio : Western Biographical Publishing Co. Number of Pages: 1038

Author:
Publication date: 1880
Publisher: Cincinnati, Ohio : Western Biographical Publishing Co.
Number of Pages: 1038