Disloyal Abolitionist Creatures
Ohio Congressman Samuel S. “Sunset” Cox and other Northern Democrats were well aware of the cause of war in 1861, and encouraged its end via a negotiated compromise in a convention of the sovereign States of the Union. They believed the States held the key to reunion or separation, not the federal agent they had created for limited functions.
Bernhard Thuersam, Director Cape Fear Historical Institute bernhard1848@att.net www.cfhi.netDisloyal Abolitionist Creatures:
“President Lincoln, proceeding on his own initiative, suspended habeas corpus in specified areas and directed summary arrest of suspected persons. In September 1862 he proclaimed that, for the duration of the war, individuals engaging in disloyal activities would be subject to martial law and trial by military commission. Under this directive the War Department jailed thousands of offenders without civil trial. Democratic success in the elections of 1862 sprang partly from popular reaction to this policy of arbitrary arrest.
Cox, outraged by the charge of disloyalty against Northern Democrats, turned the charge against the Radicals. It was not Democrats “who urged the “Wayward sisters” to depart in peace,” he said. “Were they Democrats,” he asked…who hounded on the war, and then brought Southern Negroes to fight the battles in which they would not risk their own lives?…How many abolitionists…were hiding from the draft, or paying…substitutes?
It was such craven creatures as these, who charged Northern Democrats with secession sympathy….By what irony of events was it that these creatures – who were at times more disloyal to a constitutional Union than the most violent secessionists – who wormed themselves and their plots into national affairs, and prolonged the war in which they had no part, except to incite the conflict and fan the flames of passion.”
(“Sunset” Cox, Irrepressible Democrat, David Lindsey, Wayne State University Press, 1959, page 68)
Harold
