Philadelphia (Repplier)/Chapter 20

IT is the irony of fate that the province Penn founded to be the home of peace should have gained distinction as a fighting state. He had planned a refuge from the din of contention, the wickedness of bloodshed; and the colony he loved cast aside the traditions which had nourished her. Pennsylvania, as Mr. Sydney Fisher observes, has, in the course of her history, "produced more distinguished military men, manufactured more war material, and had more important battles in more different wars fought on her soil, than any other State in the Union." It is the old story of destiny and the plough overturning the plans of men and mice.

Theoretically, Philadelphia had always been opposed to slavery. Germantown protested against the holding of slaves in Penn's lifetime, when the custom was universal. The Friends had ceaselessly combated what they believed to be a deadly evil; and the keen desire of the southern congressmen to remove the seat of government to Washington arose from a not unnatural anxiety to escape the endless protests of ​the Quaker Abolitionists. It is true that the populace, largely composed of foreign elements, grew more and more hostile to the anti-slavery agitators, until its anger culminated in negro riots, and the burning of Pennsylvania Hall. But Philadelphia and Philadelphia's mob were never in accord. It is true also that the city's trade was largely with the South, that she had always been on terms of especial friendship with southern towns and states, and that she was unwilling to see this cordial understanding weakened, and her commerce injured, by reckless agitation on the part of those who had no interests at stake. The abolition movement had never wholly won her favour, and, though the Fugitive Slave Law was little more to her liking, she strove for years to enforce it, to keep faith with her neighbours, and to respect their legal rights. It was a conflict of emotions, the end of which might have been easily foreseen by those who witnessed the joyous welcome given to Abraham Lincoln before his inauguration, and the enthusiasm evoked when the President-elect raised the new flag with its thirty-four stars—the last star for the recently adopted state of Kansas—over the roof of Independence Hall. The lessons taught by those historic walls had not been learned in vain. Philadelphia may have regarded with cold aversion the New England orators who stirred the animosity she was most anxious to allay; but there was neither doubt in her ​mind nor hesitation in her actions when the safety of the Union was imperilled. Of speeches in the market-place she had grown weary and mistrustful;

"Over the Roof of Independence Hall"

but, if the call came, she was ready as of old to argue the matter stolidly in platoons.

The call did come with the attack on Fort Sumter, and with the President's demand for seventy-five thousand volunteers to quell the rebellion. The first ​State to respond was Quaker Pennsylvania, the first soldiers sent to Washington were five companies of Pennsylvania militia, under the command of General Robert Patterson and General William Keim. General Patterson was at this time in his seventieth year. He had served in the war of 1812, and in the war with Mexico; but an Irishman from county Tyrone is seldom too old to fight, and General Scott, then commanding the United States army, entrusted to the care of this Philadelphia veteran the "Department of Washington," and the protection of the Capitol.

Twenty-five regiments were exacted as Pennsylvania's first quota of men. They were raised immediately, and thirty more were offered, but, at the time, refused. The Pennsylvania Reserves were organized the same year for the defence of the State,—fifteen thousand men, serving three years, and holding themselves in readiness for any emergency. The emergency came quick enough after the Confederate victory at Bull Run. The President instantly called the Reserves to Washington, and from that time to the close of the struggle they fought with great distinction, never being permitted to return to the service of their State.

Meanwhile the industries of war changed Philadelphia into a great hive, where men and women toiled like bees to manufacture much that the country needed, and needed instantly. In the arsenal, men laboured ​day and night; in the Southwark Navy Yard, the force was gradually increased from six hundred to seventeen hundred, and yet the work could not be done in time. Cannons were cast in the foundries, thousands of wagons were made for the service of the artillery and of the commissariat. Countless throngs of women were employed in cutting out and sewing the blue-grey uniforms of the soldiers, now hastening from every township in the State, from every home in the city, to bear their parts in the bloody strife.

Yet even while Pennsylvania's sons went forth to join the ranks, even while Meade, McClellan, Reynolds, and many more were heaping up honours for her name, she was, none the less, the home of the "Copperhead," of the Democrat whose heart was not in the war, and who ardently desired peace. He was a force to be reckoned with, an opponent not easily subdued. The ceaseless cry for more men, more men, and ever more men to fill up the places of the dead; the terrible carnage in each succeeding battle; the overflowing hospitals; the desolate homes; the flinging away of human lives without stint, without mercy, without reckoning,—these things embittered the soul of the Copperhead, and lent weight to his vehement denunciations. His unwelcome presence, his unsilenced tongue, evoked endless complications; not the least of which was the deciding where freedom of speech ended, and disloyalty began. This ​was a point on which zealous patriots and conservative lawyers naturally failed to agree. Judge Cadwalader and his brothers on the bench were kept busy defining the exact nature of treason and misprision of treason; but their verdicts awakened little enthusiasm in the hearts of jurymen or the crowd. If a man sold firearms to the Confederates, that was treasonable, and he could—when caught—be promptly punished. But the editor of an evening paper might disparage President Lincoln, and praise President Davis, and the angry people were told this was the privilege of citizenship. They called it treason, though the judges wouldn't, and they broke windows and battered doors to emphasize their opinions; demanding indignantly, when arrested, if traitors were to be coddled, and loyal men punished, in the City of Brotherly Love.

When, in the summer of 1863, came the news of General Lee's advance to the Shenandoah Valley, the wildest excitement reigned throughout the Middle States, and centred itself in Philadelphia. Once more was heard the oft-repeated call for volunteers. A hundred thousand men the President demanded, to meet this sudden danger, and half of them were to be raised in Pennsylvania. The harvests were ripening with few hands to reap them; the dead lay uncounted in the trenches of every battlefield; but there was no holding back when the summons came. Governor ​Curtin issued his proclamation, asking for soldiers to defend the State, and young and old responded swiftly to the appeal. Councils granted five hundred thousand dollars for home defences, and all Philadelphia citizens, exempt from active service, were bidden to enlist in a corps organized for the protection of the town. The ordinary business of life stood still. Shops were closed, and anxious crowds thronged Chestnut Street, and pressed about the State House, eager for tidings, yet fearful lest it should be evil tidings that they heard, lest word should come that Lee was even then advancing into the heart of Pennsylvania, and would stand at the city's doors.

General George G. Meade was at this time in command of the Army of the Potomac, whose leaders had succeeded each other with bewildering and disheartening rapidity. The battle that decided the fortunes of the State was fought at Gettysburg on the first, second, and third of July; a pitiless, glorious battle, where both armies contended with desperate valour for three awful days, and where the loss of life was too appalling to be calmly considered. In Philadelphia, wild and contradictory rumours filled all hearts with suspense until the morning of the fifth, when Meade's official despatches announced that Lee's advance had been checked; and, immediately after, the sick and wounded came pouring into the city. General Hancock, with a shattered leg, and five hundred unfortunate

​companions arrived on the fifth, and, by the twelfth, over four thousand injured soldiers lay in our hospitals, bearing witness to the cost of deliverance. Three thousand Confederate prisoners were at the same time carried to Fort Delaware. It was not easy to rejoice with so much suffering on every side, and when the long lists of the dead carried mourning to countless homes.

The news of the capture of Vicksburg by General Grant pointed clearly to the end of the unequal combat, and men began to ask themselves how much longer these ragged, unpaid, undaunted southern soldiers intended to hold out against fate. The feeble resources of the South were waning fast; those of the North were practically inexhaustible. Immediately after the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, President Lincoln issued a proclamation, demanding three hundred thousand men to serve three years. They were to be raised by conscription, for it was no longer an easy task to find that number of volunteers; and, by the middle of July, the drafting—bitter work—began in Philadelphia. Before seven months had passed, two hundred thousand more men were needed to fill the gaps made by Grant's bloody conquests. In these two conscriptions, Philadelphia's quota was thirteen thousand men; yet she stood stanchly by her Republican governor, and by the great Republican President, though General ​McClellan was deeply beloved in the city of his birth, and the anger aroused when he was superseded in command by General Burnside added immeasurably to the strength of the Copperheads, and to the disquiet of the whole population. The emancipation of the slaves had been gladly welcomed, even by the majority of the Democrats, and all classes united in one great effort to soften the sufferings of the wounded soldiers, whose numbers had now risen to dreadful proportions, notwithstanding the ceaseless thinning of their ranks by fever.

From the beginning of the war, Philadelphia had taxed her energies to the utmost in the unceasing effort to provide accommodation for the sick and injured. After the second battle of Bull Run, seventeen hundred of these unfortunates arrived within twenty-four hours; and, after Grant's battles in Virginia, five thousand were sent in an incredibly short time from the South, to be crowded into the already overflowing hospitals. It was well-nigh impossible to obtain trained and competent nurses; and the city gladly accepted the aid offered by the Sisters of Charity, at whose head was a woman of singular capacity and strength of character, Sister Gonzaga, well known for the work she did during those trying years. In the summer of 1864 the great Sanitary Fair was opened in Logan Square, where a number of buildings had been hastily erected for the ​purpose. It was like a little "World's Fair," brilliant, beautiful, varied,—everything but gay,—gayety being hard to grasp after more than three years of civil war. President Lincoln came from Washington to do it honour, and the proceeds, amounting to over a million of dollars, were devoted to the purchase of hospital supplies for the wounded soldiers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

In December, 1864, there was still another call for three hundred thousand men, and the proclamation of the President allowed less than four weeks for the drafting of this new army, to which Philadelphia's contribution was eleven thousand, five hundred soldiers. It was, however, the last conscription of the war. The South lay devastated, drained of every resource, without money, without food, without ammunition. Boys of fifteen and old grey-haired men were fighting in her enfeebled ranks. The fertile lands were barren of their harvests, and, in the broad track of Sherman's destroying army, women and children starved by their desolate hearths. The end, so long deferred, had come at last; and on the tenth of April, 1865, word was carried to waiting Philadelphia that the remnant of Lee's forces, a pitiful remnant of twenty-six thousand men, had surrendered to Grant, and that the war was over. From her old State House roof rang out the joyful tidings, and every heart responded with rapture to the message ​of the bell. The war was over. It was hard to believe the truth, hard to feel sure that the pitiless drafting and the pitiless slaughter were already things of the past, and that men of one nation, brothers of one parent stem, were no longer marching to kill each other in the open field. Pennsylvania had sent over three hundred and sixty-six thousand of her sons to do this deadly work. One out of every eight inhabitants—a ghastly proportion—had gone forth to fight. What wonder that Pennsylvania's great city should draw a deep breath of relief when this pressure was lifted from her heart! Out of the handful of soldiers who had left the State during the war with Mexico, only one half returned. Out of the vast army who departed for the Civil War, so many perished that the universal joy was subdued by almost universal mourning.

The news of President Lincoln's assassination came like a bolt from the blue, and turned the public content into sorrow and ominous gloom. His body was brought to Philadelphia on the twenty-second of April, and lay in state for two days in Independence Hall, where four years before he had raised the new flag amid the joyous enthusiasm of the crowd. Now the people came in thousands to gaze sadly at his bier, and thousands more were turned from the doors when the two short days were over. It was a tragic ending to the story of the war, and it robbed peace of its gladness and its triumph.