Ohio History Journal

BENJAMIN F. WADE AND THE ATROCITY PROPA-

GANDA OF THE CIVIL WAR

 

By HARRY WILLIAMS

 

The atrocity propaganda issued in the North during the

Civil War flowered in bewildering abundance from a variety of

persons   and   agencies.    Heads    of governmental departments,

semi-official bodies, editors, members of Congress, and private

individuals devoted their efforts to the dissemination of tales of

cruelties and barbarisms practiced by the Confederate Govern-

ment and its soldiery.¹ Although these multitudinous produc-

tions were often amateurish and unrelated, the greater number

took their information and inspiration from a common source,

the reports of the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of

the War.

The Committee, a joint body of both houses, had been

established at the insistence of the Radical Republican faction

in December, 1861. The Radical chieftains, disturbed by the

inaction of the armies, Abraham Lincoln's failure to adopt a

vigorous anti-slavery policy, and the prevalence of Democratic

generals in important posts, secured the creation of an investiga-

tive committee endowed with broad powers to inquire into all

phases of "the conduct of the war." The Committee, function-

ing for the duration of the war, furnished Congress with infor-

mation concerning military movements and the administration of

the army, strove to replace conservative generals with officers de-

voted to the tenets of radicalism, and pressed the Radical policy

 

1 Stories of southern atrocities found ready and eager acceptance in the North.

Thirty years of sectional controversy had fixed in the popular mind a stereotype of

the slaveholding southerner: cruel, treacherous, animated by savage feelings of hatred

toward the people of the North. At the outbreak of war, editors and clergymen warned

that the South would wage a struggle characterized by barbarism and savagery. Rev.

W. H. Furness, A Discourse Delivered on the Occasion of the National Fast (Phila-

delphia, 1861), 12, 13; New York Tribune, September 30, 1861, excerpts from sermons

of fifteen New York and Boston ministers; New York Tribune, December 14, editor-

ial; New York Times, May 1, Grant Goodrich to Lyman Trumbull, July 29, Lyman

Trumbull MSS. (in Library of Congress). For an account of some of the agencies

engaged in propaganda work, see W. B. Hesseltine, "The Propaganda Literature of

Confederate Prisons," in The Journal of Southern History, I, (1935), 57-67.

(33)

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34     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

of emancipation in Congress and upon Lincoln.2       Among these

important activities the members found time to essay several

adventures into the field of atrocity propaganda. The commit-

tee's facilities for investigation and the authoritative nature of

its reports made it the leader of all the instrumentalities engaged

in arousing a mass-hatred of the enemy. The dominating figure

of the committee, which included such well-known leaders and

Radicals as Senator Zachariah Chandler and Representatives

George W. Julian and John Covode, was the chairman, Senator

Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio. A bitter critic of slavery and the

southern social system from the day of his arrival in the Senate

in 1851, Wade saw in the outbreak of war the long-awaited

opportunity to destroy both, and he proposed to use the Com-

mittee as the engine of destruction.3 He was the most active and

energetic member, taking the lead in the work of investigation,

the writing of reports, and the sometimes stormy conferences

with Lincoln and the Cabinet. The production of atrocity propa-

ganda became his special interest, and he was responsible for the

vivid documents depicting Confederate savagery that aroused and

even horrified northern opinion.

Early in the Committee's career, Wade found adequate and

pressing reasons for exploiting real or alleged Confederate

atrocities. Probing the causes of Union defeats at Manassas and

Ball's Bluff in 1861, the chairman and his colleagues learned from

Generals Irvin McDowell and C. M. Meigs that the superior

dash and courage of the Confederates had given them the victory.

The officers asserted that this desirable quality was the result

of a hatred for the North which motivated the southern soldiers.

The numerous questions that Wade shot at the officers indicated

that he grasped the military importance of inculcating similar

sentiments into the northern masses and volunteer armies.⁴ Wade's

2 For the creation of the Committee, see Congressional Globe, 37 Cong., 2 Sess.,

pt. 1, p. 16-7, 29-32, 110; Life of Zachariah Chandler (Detroit, 1880), 216-7; George W.

Julian, Political Recollections (Chicago, 1884), 201. The records of the Committee exist

in eight volumes, three published in 1863, three in 1865, and two in 1866, as Committee

on the Conduct of the War, Reports (Washington), hereafter cited as C. C. W.,

Reports.

3 Benjamin F. Wade Traitors and Their Sympathizers (Washington, 1863), 2, 5;

Cong. Globe, 38 Cong., 2 Sess., pt. 1, p. 161.

4 C. C. W., Reports, 1863, I, 139, 155. McDowell testified on December 26, 1861,

and Meigs the next day.

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BENJAMIN F. WADE: WILLIAMS                       35

 

intimate on the Committee, Julian of Indiana, came to the same

conclusion when General Ambrose Everett Burnside told him

that the Federal disaster at Fredericksburg was due to a lack of

fighting spirit among the soldiers, who did not "adequately hate"

their enemy.⁵ If this motive was purely military, the dominant

spirits of the Committee possessed others wholly political.       The

Radical press continually used reports of Confederate inhumani-

ties to southern unionists as the basis of demands for emancipation

and the employment of negro soldiers. Wade and his followers

recognized the political value of this potent appeal; they also

knew that the officers and soldiers must be taught to hate slavery

if the Radical policies of confiscation of "rebel" property were

to be effective.⁶

Equipped with an adequate appreciation of the military and

political advantages to be secured by the dissemination of atrocity

propaganda, Wade's committee soon found an opportunity to

display its talents.  In July, 1861, immediately after the battle

of Manassas, sensational stories of Confederate mutilation of the

Union dead and of inhumanities inflicted upon northern prisoners

emblazoned the press. The "Rebels," it was asserted, had used

the bodies found upon the field for purposes of sport and amuse-

ment; they had tortured the wounded unto death.⁷ Indignant

citizens read of insidious attempts to poison Union soldiers, of the

wrecking of passenger trains in the border states, of unspeakable

outrages committed upon southern unionists, and of the inhuman

treatment meted out in Richmond prisons. Soon a new and

startling charge was added to this growing list of southern

barbarisms.    It was announced that the Confederate Govern-

ment had enlisted large bodies of the southwestern Indians in its

armies and that the horrors of Indian warfare would soon be

known in the border states.⁸

 

5 George W. Julian, Select Speeches (Cincinnati, 1867), 33; Julian, Recollections,

225. Julian believed it a military necessity that the people and the armies should

hate the "Rebels."

6 Frank Leslie's Newspaper, August 24, 1851; New York Tribune, September

16; ibid., May 30, 1862, army correspondence, p. 1.

7 New York Times, July 25, 1861; Harper's Weekly, August 17, contains a sketch

of the scenes that supposedly ensued after the battle.

8 New York Tribune, September 2, letter of a soldier; September 1, 2, 6, 19,

October 31, December 14; New York Times, August 18, September 30; Harper's Weekly,

November 2; Washington National Intelligencer, August 28, September 2, 5, 16; Leslie's

Newspaper, August 24, September 14.

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36     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

The persistent continuation of these rumors and charges

prompted Charles Sumner to present a resolution in the Senate

on April 1, 1862, instructing the Committee to collect evidence

regarding "the barbarous treatment of the Rebels at Manassas

of the remains of officers and soldiers of the United States," and

the employment of "Indian savages" by the Confederacy.            In

offering his resolution Sumner declared that the North was in

conflict with a people lower in the scale of civilization than

themselves, and he wanted a record of southern barbarism for

the use of future historians.9

As early as February, the Committee had examined witnesses

on their knowledge of the Manassas cruelties, and on the day

following the passage of Sumner's resolution the inquisitors were

busily at work. Two Union surgeons captured at Manassas,

people who had visited the field after the battle to claim the bodies

of relatives and friends, and returned prisoners from Richmond

thronged the Committee rooms to offer their testimony. Wade

took charge of the questioning of these witnesses, and his queries

indicated that he had prepared himself for the investigation by a

thorough study of the press accounts of the scenes following the

battle. The surgeons testified that the Confederate authorities

had inflicted needless brutalities upon the Union wounded, re-

fusing them food, water, shelter, and proper medical attention.

Only young and inexperienced surgeons were permitted to per-

form operations upon them, and they, Wade charged in the Com-

mittee's report, "seemed to delight in hacking and butchering"

the patients.¹⁰ Men lately returned from the prisons of Richmond

assured Wade that the officials deprived the inmates of proper

shelter, medical treatment, and food, and permitted the guards

to torture them.11 These revelations profoundly impressed the

Committee, but they found even more telling indictments of the

Confederacy in the testimony relating to the alleged desecration

9 C. C. W., Reports, 1863, III, 449; Harper's Weekly, April 19, 1862. Sumner

was fully aware of the military and political necessity of arousing a hatred of slavery.

See Richard Henry Dana to Charles Francis Adams, November 25, 1861, in C. F.

Adams, Richard Henry Dana (Boston, 1890), II, 259.

10 C. C. W., Reports, 1863, III, 450-1, 468-74.

11 Ibid., 449-50, 451, 452, 461-5, 485-7, 487-90. Some of this testimony was hearsay,

and most of it reflected more upon the poor administration of the southern prisons

than upon the character of the officials.

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BENJAMIN F. WADE: WILLIAMS                   37

 

of the Union dead. Witnesses who had gone over the field after

the battle and talked to Negroes and whites in the neighborhood

furnished sensational material on this point.    The Committee

learned that for two weeks after the engagement the bodies of

northern soldiers had lain naked and unburied upon the ground.

Several witnesses stated that they found remains with the head

or other portions removed.    Others had heard that the Con-

federates boiled the dead bodies to obtain bones as relics, used

Yankee shinbones as drumsticks, collected skulls to serve as

drinking cups, and carved rings and other ornaments from thigh

bones.12

Wade wrote a report of the Committee's investigation in the

latter part of April, although he continued to collect evidence for

several months. Written in the vigorous style affected by the

chairman, the report was a powerful, moving document. Wade

reviewed the testimony of the surgeons and the returned prisoners,

and presented his own conclusions. His most eloquent para-

graphs were reserved for "the treatment of our heroic dead,"

where the "fiendish spirit of the rebels was most prominently

exhibited." He appealed to the public sentiment of the North

and of Europe to outlaw the author of these outrages:

They have now crowned the rebellion by the perpetration of deeds

scarcely known even to savage warfare.... Our fellow countrymen, here-

tofore sufficienty impressed by the generosity of the government of the Unit-

ed States, and by the barbarous character of the crusade against it, will

be shocked by the statements of these unimpeached and unimpeachable wit-

nesses, and foreign nations must, with one accord, consign to lasting odium

the authors of crimes, which in all their details, exceed the worst excesses

of the Sepoys of India. ... It was reserved for your Committee to dis-

close as a concerted system their insults to the wounded, and their mutila-

tion and desecration of the gallant dead.13

No report was submitted on the employment of Indians by

the Confederacy; Wade stated that time had not permitted them

to conduct an investigation of this subject in the West. How-

ever, a number of documents submitted by western officers were

included in the testimony. These charged that Indians fought

12 Ibid., 451, 453-4, 458-60, 460-1, 473-4, 474-7.

13 Ibid., 453, 455-7.

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38    OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

in the battle of Pea Ridge, and that Union survivors and bodies

had been mutilated and scalped.14

Wade released the report on "Rebel barbarities" to the press

in May, although he held back all other publications of the Com-

mittee's researches until the following year.15        The Manassas

document became the immediate theme of northern propagandists.

An influential New York weekly called it "one of the most

melancholy documents in history," an accurate description of the

acts of men barbarized by slavery.16 For months the Repub-

lican press used the report as the source of their propaganda

stories, and sketches based upon its vivid paragraphs appeared

in the illustrated weeklies.17 Pamphleteers composed sensational

summaries,18 and Republican members of Congress utilized the

material for speeches in legislative halls and on the stump.19

The next atrocity adventure of Wade and his colleagues was

a double-edged attempt to maintain a war psychosis and to at-

tack the President for his refusal to order a system of retaliation

inflicted upon Confederate prisoners. Reports of conditions in

southern prisons reaching the North convinced many people that

the Confederate officials were deliberately following a policy

designed to destroy the prisoners, and demands arose that the

Government retaliate in kind.       Wade and Chandler constantly

urged Lincoln to make a declaration that reprisals would be re-

sorted to, unless the Confederacy improved the conditions of its

prisons.20 The Radical leaders also resented the failure of the

administration to adopt measures of retaliation designed to force

the Confederacy to treat the negro soldiers of the North as

equals and entitled to the protection of the laws of war.21

 

14 Ibid., 490-1; Harper's Weekly, February 7, 1863.

15 The main body and the conclusions appeared in the New York Tribune, May

1, 1862.

16 Harper's Weekly, May 17, 1862.

17 Ibid., June 14, 1862, October 18, 1862, February 7, 1863; Leslie's Newspaper,

April 4, 1863.

18 J. R. Bartlett, Barbarities of the Rebels (Providence, 1863); The Rebel Pirate's

Fatal Prize (Philadelphia, 1862).

19 Julian, Speeches, 71. During the campaign of 1863, Julian, using the Com-

mittee's report, tried to arouse among the masses a feeling of hatred toward the

enemy. See Julian, Recollections, 235.

20 New York Times, December 5, 1863, March 5, 12, 31, 1864; Harper's Weekly,

December 5, 1863; New York Tribune, March 5, 1864; W. B. Hesseltine, Civil War

Prisons (Columbus, 1930), 191-7; Adam Gurowski, Diary . . . 863-'64-'65 (Washington,

1866), 191.

21 New York Independent, June 4, 1863; Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, 112, 187;

John G. Nicolay, A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1902), 352.

• 6
 

BENJAMIN F. WADE: WILLIAMS                          39

 

In April, 1864, a wave of hysteria gripped the North at the

reported massacre of a negro garrison and its white officers in

Ft. Pillow, Tennessee, by       Bedford   Forrest and his cavalry.²²

Lurid accounts of the bloody work of Forrest's troops appeared

on the front pages of the press.23       Demands for reprisals upon

Confederate prisoners mingled with Radical denunciation of Lin-

coln for his failure to force the Davis government to recognize

the negro soldiers as equals.²⁴ The harassed President, in a speech

at Baltimore, promised a system of retaliation if the Ft. Pillow

rumors were substantiated by some official body.25

Spurred by this promise, the Radical leaders passed a Senate

resolution directing the Committee to investigate the facts of

the Ft. Pillow slaughter.26    That agency accepted the responsibility

and designated Wade and Daniel W. Gooch as a sub-committee

to proceed to the West and collect evidence on the spot. The

two members departed on their mission armed with Secretary of

War Stanton's orders directing the military authorities to furnish

them full cooperation.27 At Cairo, Mound City, Ft. Pillow, Colum-

bus, Kentucky, and Memphis, they examined seventy-eight wit-

nesses. This list included hospital surgeons who had cared for

the survivors, twenty-one colored and twenty white soldiers of

the garrison, general officers, and people who visited the fort after

the engagement.28

Their evidence gathered, Wade and Gooch returned to Wash-

ington. While the members were considering the testimony, Wade

placed before them a letter from Stanton, suggesting that they go

to Annapolis and examine there a group of recently returned

Union prisoners. The secretary was sure the Committee would

 

22 The battle occurred on April 12. Eric Sheppard, Bedford Forrest (London,

1930), 168-72; J. A. Wyeth, General Nathan Bedford Forrest (New York, 1899), 344-62.

23 Leslie's Newspaper, May 7, 1864; New York Independent, April 21; Harper's

Weekly, April 30.

24 New York Independent, April 28, May 5; Leslie's Newspaper, May 7; Harper's

Weekly, April 30; S. A. Ballou, letter of April 25, Edwin M. Stanton MSS. (in Li-

brary of Congress); J. A. Sharpless to Joseph Holt, April 24, Joseph Holt MSS. (in

Library of Congress).

25 John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln (New

York, 1905), X, 49.

26 C. C. W., Reports, 1865, I, p. xxv; Senate Reports, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., no. 63,

p. 1, "Ft. Pillow Report." The resolution was passed on April 16.

27 Stanton's three orders of April 18, Letterbook of Edwin M. Stanton, III, pt.

2, MS. (in Library of Congress); Julian, Recollections, 238. They left Washington

on April 19.

28 For examples of the testimony of these witnesses, see Senate Reports, 38

Cong., 1 Sess., no. 63, p. 13-4, 30, 31, 40, 44.

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40      OHIO ARCHEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

find evidence of a "deliberate system of savage and barbarous

treatment and starvation," practiced upon northern inmates of

Confederate prisons, and that a full revelation of the facts would

"fill with horror the civilized world."²⁹ On the next day, May 5,

Wade submitted a report on Ft. Pillow which was accepted imme-

diately. Then the Committee left for Annapolis to take the tes-

timony of the prisoners.30 Julian later said that the condition of

those prisoners drew tears from      the Committee's chairman.31 A

report of the evidence collected at Annapolis was combined with

the Ft. Pillow   report and printed on May 9 as one document.32

These reports, the most expert propaganda productions of

the war, were written by Wade. The Ft. Pillow narrative con-

tained a vivid description of the events enacted after Forrest's

troopers swarmed into the fort and dispersed the frightened

negro garrison. The excesses committed, declared Wade, were not

the results of momentary passions but of a deliberate policy to

discourage the use of negro soldiers by the North.

The rebels commenced an indiscriminate slaughter, sparing neither age

nor sex, white or black, soldier or civilian. . . . Men, women ,and even

children were deliberately shot down, beaten, and hacked with sabres; some

of the children not more than ten years old were forced to stand up and face

their murderers while being shot; the sick and wounded were butchered

without mercy, the rebels even entering the hospital and dragging them out

to be shot, or killing them as they lay there unable to offer the least resis-

tance.33

Not content with slaughtering the garrison, Wade continued,

the attackers also indulged in the torture of burning soldiers alive.

Many of the wounded perished in the huts and tents which For-

rest's men fired; others were nailed to the floors or walls which

29 Stanton to Benjamin F. Wade, May 4, 1864, Stanton Letterbook, III, pt. 2;

C. C. W., Reports, 1865, I, p. xxv; House Reports, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., no. 67, p. 1,

"Returned Prisoners Report." This document is also to be found in Senate Reports,

38 Cong., 1 Sess., no. 68.

30 C. C. W., Reports, 1865, I, p. xxv.

31 Julian, Recollections, 238-9.

32 C. C. W., Reports, 1865, I, p. xxv; Cong. Globe, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., pt. 3,

p. 2171.

33 Senate Reports, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., no. 63, p. 4. The testimony on the scenes

enacted in the fort was contradictory. Captain Marshall, commanding a Union gun-

boat, said that he removed all the women, children, and sick Negroes to an island

before the battle started. Ibid., 86. That a great deal of needless slaughter did take

place is shown by the testimony on p. 13--4, 44, 51, 94. There can be no doubt that

Forrest and his men were greatly incensed by the use of negro troops and determined

to make an example of the garrison.

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BENJAMIN      F. WADE: WILLIAMS                         41

 

were then set ablaze.34 "The testimony also establishes the fact

that the rebels buried some of the living with the dead, a few of

whom succeeded in digging themselves out, or were dug out by

others, one of whom your committee found in Mound City hos-

pital and there examined."35

Accompanying the Ft. Pillow document was the shorter but

equally effective report on the Annapolis prisoners.36 Embellished

with pictures of eight wasted victims from the Richmond prisons,37

this narrative detailed the sufferings, privations, and persecutions

of the survivors. Wade charged the Confederacy with deliberately

following a policy designed "to reduce our soldiers in their

power ... to such a condition that those who may survive shall

never recover so as to be able to render any effective service in

the field."38

The Ft. Pillow and Annapolis reports produced a greater

impact upon the public and secured a more sensational reception

than any other single propaganda production of the period. Backed

by the great authority of the Committee, the reports attained

tremendous circulation. The Republican press gave them promi-

nent front-page notices, and editorially denounced the Confed-

eracy as the author of these outrages and Lincoln for permitting

the criminals to go unpunished.39 Twenty thousand extra copies

were printed for the use of the Senate.40 Pamphlet versions

flooded the country.41      One northern citizen, after reading the re-

 

34 Ibid., 5. The witnesses who testified on this point were on the field the day

after the battle. Ibid., 27, 30, 31, 94. One witness, John Penwell, said that the Con-

federate officers tried to remove men from the burning tents. Ibid., 82-3.

35 Ibid., 5. Daniel Taylor, the witness in question, testified that he feigned

death in order to escape attack. He allowed himself to be partially buried, but an

officer noticed that he was alive and had him removed. Ibid., 18-9.

36 House Reports, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., no. 67.

37 The use of pictures was a striking innovation in Civil War propaganda of

an official nature. Senator Zachariah Chandler said that language was inadequate to

describe the prisoners, that only pictures could make the people realize "the barbarities

that had been perpetrated upon them."  Cong. Globe, 38 Cong., 2 Sess., pt. 1, p. 496.

Julian spoke of the reports and their pictures as "a special installment of our pro-

ceedings, for popular use." See his Recollections, 238-9.

38 House Reports, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., no. 67, p. 3. The testimony, as in the earlier

Manassas report, revealed more of the administrative faults of the southern prisons

and the scarcity of supplies than it did of any concerted, deliberate system of destruc-

tion. The Committee members were apparently profoundly shocked by the condition

of the prisoners. In a sense Wade and Chandler were victims of the war psychosis

they had helped to create.

39 New York Tribune, May 6, May 10, 1864; New York Herald, May 8; New

York Times, May 8; Chicago Tribune, May 10; Harper's Weekly, May 21. The Demo-

cratic press, for the most part, did not print the reports.

40 Cong. Globe, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., pt. 3, p. 2171.

41 Rebel Barbarities; Official Accounts of the Cruelties Inflicted upon Union Pris-

oners and Refugees at Ft. Pillow, Libby Prison, etc. (New York, 1864); Frank

Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record (New York, 1864-68), VIII, 80-98.

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42      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

ports, recorded in his dairy: "It is horrible, atrocious. History

records no instances of such deliberate ferocity. . . . Let Lincoln

send a copy of this book to every home. It is better than the

draft or his greenbacks."42

The reports, however, failed to force Lincoln to adopt mea-

sures of reprisal. Stanton suggested a six-point program, and

the Committee pressed its merits, but the President refused to

come to a decision.43    Wade, convinced that he would never do

so, finally offered a resolution in the Senate in January, 1865, mak-

ing it mandatory upon the President to invoke retaliatory measures

upon Confederate prisoners. The Ohio Senator championed his

measure vigorously, defending it against the attacks of Democrats

and Republicans in the persons of Sumner and Henry Wilson.

His speeches bristled with criticisms of Lincoln and denuncia-

tions of southern prison officials.      He reviewed the evidence

gathered at Annapolis and even took additional testimony during

the course of the debate. "I would rather stand upon the pages

of history as the man who stood forth to vindicate our own glori-

ous soldiery . . . ," he declared, "than to stand there as the man

who shrank from his duty because it was a disagreeable one ....

I would starve the whole rebellion unless it becomes effectual

so that they release our men from this jeopardy." Despite Wade's

leadership and the valiant aid of his colleague of the Committee,

Chandler, the resolution was so emasculated by amendments at

its final passage that the author abandoned the fight.44

Wade, however, could feel well satisfied that the Committee's

propaganda labors had accomplished the desired results. Julian

believed that the atrocity reports were largely responsible for the

sustained drive that brought final victory to the Union.⁴⁵ Their

influence was also apparent in the political field. Using the ma-

 

42 William E. Doster, Diary, July 4, in Doster, Lincoln and Episodes of the

Civil War (New York, 1915), 243. For another example of popular reaction, see the

minutes of the Congregational Association of Michigan for 1864, The Congregational

Churches of Michigan for the First Fifty Years (Printed by order of the Associa-

tion, 1892), 187; Julian, Recollections, 239.

43 Stanton to Lincoln, May 5, Stanton Letterbook, III, pt. 2; F. A. Flower,

Edwin McMasters Stanton (Akron, 1905), 235-6; Edward Bates, Diary . . . 1859-1866;

ed. by H. K. Beale (Washington, 1933), 365.

44 Cong. Globe, 38 Cong., 2 Sess., pt. 1, p. 267-9, 363-5, 381-91, 410, 426-35, 452-61,

491-500, 515-22, for the debates; Chandler to Mrs. Chandler, January 16, 1865, Zachariah

Chandler MSS. (in Library of Congress); New York Independent, February 2, 1865,

Washington correspondence.

45 Julian, Speeches, 33.

• 10
 

BENJAMIN F. WADE: WILLIAMS                   43

 

terial in the reports, especially that relating to prison conditions,

the Radical press urged that the perpetrators of such barbarisms

must not be permitted to come back into the Union as equals.46

The assassination of Lincoln intensified this appeal. The men who

murdered helpless Negroes and tortured prisoners had now

climaxed their villainies by killing the best of Presidents! They

should be excluded from the Union.⁴⁷

Wade himself, in the Committee's final report, attempted to

sustain the passions which his reports had aroused. He adjured

the people, while they welcomed the returning soldiers, to remem-

ber those who would not come home, those unfortunate victims

of "that savage and infernal spirit which actuated those who

spared not the prisoners at their mercy, who sought by midnight

arson to destroy hundreds of women and children, and who

hesitated not to resort to means and to commit acts so horrible that

the nations of the earth must stand aghast as they are told what

has been done."⁴⁸  To save the Union, Wade had assisted in the

creation of a war psychosis. Now he proposed to use that

psychosis as an aid in reconstructing the Union according to the

dictates of his political creed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

46 New York Independent, April 13, 1865; Leslie's Newspaper, April 15.

47 New York Independent, April 27, May 11, 1865; Leslie's Newspaper, April 29,

May 6, May 20.

48 C. C. W., Reports, 1865, I, p. iii-iv.

• 11