Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
The following is an editorial that appeared in the New York Times on
Dec. 7, 1863. Please note that the rumor in the first sentence was untrue; Breckinridge lived until 1875.
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If it be true, as is now positively declared, that a loyal bullet has sent this traitor to eternity, every loyal heart will feel satisfaction and will not scruple to express it. Ordinarily, enmity is disarmed before death; reproach is silenced, and even the sternest justice makes way for pity. The form that is shrouded is a sacred thing, and the grave itself is an altar on which every bitter feeling should be sacrificed forever. Human censorship does not presume to follow the spirit that has gone to its Eternal Judge; and even the most rigid feels constrained to remember his own frailties, and forgive. But where Death strikes such a public enemy as this, it exacts no silent obeisance. Personal feeling has no part in the matter. It is to be regarded purely as a public event; and if it really has the shape of a public deliverance, it is just as right to welcome it as any other public blessing. It is just as proper, too, to speak the truth of such a criminal when dead as when living. Humanity has a just reckoning with guilt of this particular dye that can never be satisfied without posthumous infamy.
If ever there was a public man pledged to a career of fidelity and honor, it was John C. Breckinridge. He belonged to a family that had always been noted for patriotism, as well as for every other exalted quality; as a young man he was personally associated with such great-souled patriots as Clay and Crittenden; the people of his own State, in his early youth, took him into their confidence with a readiness seldom exhibited, and the people of the United States elevated him to the second office in their gift, at an age without precedent in American history. Every inherited sentiment, every implanted principle, every obligation of gratitude, forbade him to be unfaithful to his country; but an unholy ambition ruined him. By nature frank, ardent, manly and eloquent, he fell a prey to the lures of higher preferment held out to him by plotters against the peace of the country. They named him for the Presidency at Charleston, and he accepted the nomination, though it was given in violation of every principle which had ruled Democratic conventions, and was sure to divide and destroy his party. How far he was actually cognizant, at that time, of the secession plot, is not yet known. It may be that he was let into the full confidence of the prime conspirators, and fully understood that he should help them ruin if they could not help him rule. It may be that he was at first merely a pliant dupe in the hands of crafty knaves. In measuring his guilt this matters little. The time came when the treason of his supporters was no longer disguised; and it was then his duty to have renounced them and denounced them. Had he been a true man, his indignation at the use the traitors had made of him, would have filled him with all the intenser hate of the treason itself; and the very fact that he had done something unwittingly to further it, would have stimulated him to redoubled efforts afterward to thwart and foil it. Instead of this, he showed all sympathy with it just as long as he could do so safely within the public councils, and then he betook himself bodily to the camp of the rebels. It might have been in weakness that he was first made a dupe, but his subsequent career marked him one of the basest and wickedest of traitors.
We know that it is not easy to draw distinctions between the shades of this black treason against the Union. Yet we can recognize that some sort of charity may be given to a man as Stonewall Jackson, who bred to the doctrine of paramount State sovereignty, and conscientiously believed that it was his duty to obey the decision of his State expressed through constitutional forms. But no such extenuating plea can be advanced for John C. Breckinridge. In one of his last speeches in the Senate, he declared that he was a son of Kentucky, and would follow her destiny. And yet, in spite of the fact that Kentucky, within a week afterward declared, by a majority of sixty thousand votes at the polls, that she would not go out of the Union, he went home and issued a manifesto, declaring that "there is no longer a Senate of the United States within the meaning and spirit of the Constitution; the United States no longer exist; the Union is dissolved;" and that he was now about to "exchange, with proud satisfaction, a term of six years in the Senate of the United States for the musket of a soldier." The declared intention he made good by soon afterward rallying his friends at Russellville, where a resolution was passed, in so many words, bidding "defiance both to the Federal and State Governments," and delegates were appointed to the Provisional Congress of the Confederacy. Breckinridge was soon afterward as thoroughly identified with the rebels as Jeff. Davis himself; though in doing it he had to turn his back, not only upon the Union, but upon his own State, whose destiny he had solemnly protested that he would follow. Of all the accursed traitors of the land there has been none more heinously false than he -- none whose memory will live in darker ignominy. God grant the country a speedy deliverance of all such parricides.
A very nicely written editorial, Tim. Thank you for posting it.
Ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
That's very intersting. Seeing as it was done in 1863, I might have approved of it had I been around back then.
In retrospect, tho, I must strongly disagree with it.
I think that Breckinridge was one of the more honorable of the major Confederates.
The author says "Yet we can recognize that some sort of charity may be given to a man as Stonewall Jackson",
well that neglects to mention the oath betrayed by Jackson and such as Lee, etc. gave as officers of the US army.
Why "charity" to Jackson? Perhaps this editor was in such awe of Jackson as he was held at the time even in the North. Jackson was a noble soldier (?) while Breckinridge was a mere politician and novice soldier?
Breckinridge, fortunately, was brought very late in the game to reorder the Confederate War Dept. in Feb. 1865.
He assured that inportant records of the CSA would be preserved, knowing the cause was doomed.
He organized the evacuation of Richmond out of chaos, and assisted in the surrender of Johnston's army in North Carolina.
He also made a slick escape from the authorities after his head.
__________________ -
"It was a very peculiar time." - Franklin D. Cossitt
Ancestors in USA Army: 6th IA Inf, 11th IL Cav, 1st AL Cav; 122nd NY Inf; 6th MI Cav; 35th MA Inf; 100th IL Inf; 1st CO Inf/Cav; 22nd IN Inf
That's very intersting. Seeing as it was done in 1863, I might have approved of it had I been around back then.
In retrospect, tho, I must strongly disagree with it.
I think that Breckinridge was one of the more honorable of the major Confederates.
The author says "Yet we can recognize that some sort of charity may be given to a man as Stonewall Jackson",
well that neglects to mention the oath betrayed by Jackson and such as Lee, etc. gave as officers of the US army.
Why "charity" to Jackson? ...
Time changes attitudes, of course.
I think there are differences, and most Americans seemed to feel there were at the time. Jackson was no longer a serving soldier in 1861 and had not been for many years. Lee resigned his commission, as did many others, before serving against the US.
Breckinridge, though, had allowed himself to be the frontman for the Fire-Eater driven splitting of the Democratic Party in 1860. This virtually assured a Republican President would be elected -- which the Fire-Eaters wanted to push the wavering South into secession. The editorial is kind enough to suggest he might have been hoodwinked into it by unscrupulous politicians and apparently not-quite-bright-enough to figure it out in time. But that action alone is a vast difference from a man like Lee, who maintained his opposition to secession all the way up to Virginia's secession, and would later say he would have done exactly the same if he did it again.
Breckinridge's actions later also show a clear difference. Lee said he would follow his state and did -- even though he was opposed to secession. Breckinridge said he would follow his state, even though he favored secession -- and then, when Kentucky did not secede, Breckinridge went back on his word. He was a serving US Senator in 1861, newly seated; he went home, defied his nation and state, and chose to serve the Confederacy. Understandable, perhaps, given his views and situation -- but not particularly honorable. Better he had not made false statements first.
Other than that, he seems to have been a fair gentleman, intelligent and talented, who suffered a difficulty with liquor many others had and have. His performance at New Market, for instance, leads to a belief the South should have made more use of his ability in the field, as well as off.
BTW, John C. Breckinridge had gone home to KY after the special session Lincoln had called for July 4, 1861. He was one of those working to keep KY neutral in the middle of the war -- probably an impossible task -- that fell apart when Confederate Leonidas Polk led his army across the border into KY in September and Grant responded by crossing the Ohio. He spoke at a series of peace rallies, saying he would resign from the Senate if KY voted to take up arms against the Confederacy. Despite his efforts, pro-Union candidates won control of the state legislature in the elections.
On September 21, 1861 he was organizing another peace rally. The state government sent a regiment to break up the rally and arrest him. Forewarned, he fled to Richmond and took service with the Confederates. On December 4, 1861, the Senate by a 36 to 0 vote expelled the Kentucky senator, declaring that Breckinridge, "the traitor," had "joined the enemies of his country."
The editorial in the New York Times at the start of this thread came from a paper that had written of him in glowing terms in 1859. Henry Jarvis Raymond was one of the founders and the chief editor from 1851-1869. Raymond was was an anti-slavery Whig before becoming a Republican -- a former employee of Greeley's, closely associated with Seward and Greeley until he ran for the Lt. Governor nomination and beat out Greeley in 1854.
Raymond generally supported Lincoln during the war, but thought he wasn't aggressive enough in prosecuting it. After the war, he was one of the first to urge a liberal policy toward the South (the Lincoln "let'em up easy" policy) and came out publicly against the Radical Republicans. Opposed Thaddeus Stevens on the "dead states" issue in late 1865 and lost his posts in the Republican Party.
From his editorial at the start of the New York Times in 1851: "There are few things in this world which it is worth while to get angry about; and they are just the things anger will not improve."
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Editorial on John C. Breckinridge 
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