Philip Dru: Administrator/Chapter XX

Chapter XX Civil War Begins

General Dru brought together an army of fifty thousand men at Madison and about forty thousand near Des Moines, and recruits were coming in rapidly.

President Rockland had concentrated twenty thousand regulars and thirty thousand militia at Chicago, and had given command to Major General Newton, he who, several years previously, won the first medal given by the War Department for the best solution of the military problem.

The President also made a call for two hundred thousand volunteers. The response was in no way satisfactory, so he issued a formal demand upon each state to furnish its quota.

The states that were in sympathy with his administration responded, the others ignored the call.

General Dru learned that large reinforcements had been ordered to Chicago, and he therefore at once moved upon that place. He had a fair equipment of artillery, considering he was wholly dependent upon that belonging to the militia of those states that had ranged themselves upon his side, and at several points in the West, he had seized factories and plants making powder, guns, clothing and camp equipment. He ordered the Iowa division to advance at the same time, and the two forces were joined at a point about fifty miles south of Chicago.

General Newton was daily expecting reënforcements, but they failed to reach him before Dru made it impossible for them to pass through.

Newton at first thought to attack the Iowa division and defeat it, and then meet the Wisconsin division, but he hesitated to leave Chicago lest Dru should take the place during his absence.

With both divisions united, and with recruits constantly arriving, Dru had an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men.

Failing to obtain the looked-for reënforcements and seeing the hopelessness of opposing so large a force, Newton began secretly to evacuate Chicago by way of the Lakes, Dru having completely cut him off by land.

He succeeded in removing his army to Buffalo, where President Rockland had concentrated more than one hundred thousand troops.

When Dru found General Newton had evacuated Chicago, he occupied it, and then moved further east, in order to hold the states of Michigan, Indiana and Western Ohio.

This gave him the control of the West, and he endeavored as nearly as possible to cut off the food supply of the East. In order to tighten further the difficulty of obtaining supplies, he occupied Duluth and all the Lake ports as far east as Cleveland, which city the Government held, and which was their furthest western line.

Canada was still open as a means of food supply to the East, as were all the ports of the Atlantic seaboard as far south as Charleston.

So the sum of the situation was that the East, so far west as the middle of Ohio, and as far south as West Virginia, inclusive of that state, was in the hands of the Government.

Western Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois, while occupied by General Dru, were divided in their sympathies. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and every state west of the Mississippi, were strongly against the Government.

The South, as a whole, was negligible, though Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri were largely divided in sentiment. That part of the South lying below the border states was in sympathy with the insurgents.

The contest had come to be thought of as a conflict between Senator Selwyn on the one hand, and what he represented, and Philip Dru on the other, and what he stood for. These two were known to be the dominating forces on either side.

The contestants, on the face of things, seemed not unevenly matched, but, as a matter of fact, the conscience of the great mass of the people, East and West, was on Dru’s side, for it was known that he was contending for those things which would permit the Nation to become again a land of freedom in its truest and highest sense, a land where the rule of law prevailed, a land of equal opportunity, a land where justice would be meted out alike to the high and low with a steady and impartial hand.