Wisconsin Historical Society
Lithograph of Camp Randall during the anti-Lincoln era. For more photos, click gallery, above.
One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War began, its echoes still reverberate in Madison. The city's political history, our attitudes toward the military, even the local landscape, were all profoundly and permanently changed by the events of 1861-1865.
Madison did not welcome the war, or the administration that fought it. And many local heroes of the age did more to hinder than help Abraham Lincoln in his fight to free the slaves.
Lincoln carried Wisconsin both before and during the war, but he did not carry Madison. In 1860, the city narrowly voted for Democrat Steven Douglas over Lincoln, 783 to 747. In 1864, when the choice was between Lincoln, a president committed to prosecuting the war until abolition, and Democratic candidate Gen. George McClellan, who would have allowed slavery to continue, Madison went for McClellan, 794-705.
Madison also twice rejected Republican governor Alexander P. Randall, an early and forceful foe of the Southern secessionists. While Wisconsin handily reelected the abolitionist Randall in 1859, he lost Madison, 956-701.
That same year, Madison reelected as its mayor George B. Smith, who in a 1862 diary entry said Lincoln was "responsible for the miserable state of things, and for this and many special and arbitrary acts which he has committed and authorized, I solemnly believe that he ought to be impeached and legally and constitutionally deposed from the high office of President."
One of Smith's successors was equally antiwar and anti-Lincoln, to the point where he could possibly be considered a Copperhead. William T. Leitch, Madison mayor from 1862 to 1865, was so against the war that he reportedly refused to assist in recruiting volunteers or raising funds for their bounties. A Scotsman who still celebrated the queen's birthday, Leitch had made a fortune in the wholesale Southern clothing trade.
As is the case today, Madison was stymied by lingering debt and state-imposed fiscal controls, which Leitch warned could soon leave the city "without the means suitable to maintain the simplest and most necessary applications of local government."
In his last annual message, Leitch denounced "the cavillings of those who disturb the public ear with crapulous complaints about frivolous matters, when, with the small means at our disposal, and the depreciation of the currency, it has been almost as much as we could do to maintain the essential features of municipal government."
Hell no, we won't go
In truth, preserving the union was not an overriding concern for some of Madison's civic leaders. Take Harlow S. Orton, who was head of the Dane County Cavalry when war broke out.
Orton, who would later serve stints as Madison mayor, dean of the UW Law School and a state Supreme Court justice, waited two days after the fall of Fort Sumter to assemble his company, then led his men to an overwhelming vote against answering the call for troops.
In a letter to his brother, Orton said he "fully and totally and emphatically" opposed Lincoln's policies, which he called war-mongering by the North that would "destroy all hope of Union forever."
Even Wisconsin's greatest progressive politician was influenced by a Supreme Court justice who denounced the Emancipation Proclamation and backed a bill to bar blacks from moving to Wisconsin. Robert La Follette often said Edward G. Ryan's famed 1873 commencement address decrying the "new and dark power" of corporations set his understanding of the relationship between labor and capital.
A decade before, Ryan had been one of Lincoln's sharpest legal critics, a Democratic attorney so skilled he got the Republicans on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to declare Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus unconstitutional.
The Common Council was also largely antiwar while the war was being fought. Except for the area east of Wisconsin Avenue, three of the four wards were solidly Democratic. The only hints of liberalism in its record is that, when state voters rejected black suffrage by a margin of five to one in 1857, Madison voters turned it down by only three to one. By 1865, only 38% of Madison voters endorsed the concept enshrined in the 15th Amendment.
It wasn't until the war ended, in April 1865, that Madison elected its first Republican mayor, party boss Elisha Keyes, who would remain a powerful political figure until the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.
Keyes had strongly supported Lincoln in both campaigns. In the 1865 election, the Democrats nominated William Noland, Madison's first black businessman, to run against him. Noland denounced this effort and did not campaign; he nonetheless received a third of the vote.
Wild in the streets
But while Madison opposed the war politically, many people within the city supported it personally. Madison men volunteered at a higher percentage than those of any other major Wisconsin city, and died in higher numbers than the state average. By early 1865, two of every three of the city's adult males had gone to war. "Madison takes the palm for patriotism," the Milwaukee News wrote.
Madisonians also gave generously through gifts and special taxes to support soldiers and their families. By war's end, the city raised more than $100,000 through private donations and special taxes for such aid.
But the greatest impact on Madison during the Civil War came because of the state. It was when Gov. Randall transformed the Wisconsin Agricultural Society fairgrounds about 1.5 miles west of the Capitol into the state's central training ground in early 1861.
Life in Madison changed dramatically, and not always for the best. About 70,000 of Wisconsin's 95,000 soldiers passed through Camp Randall over the next four years, leaving serious trouble in their wake.
There were problems from the start. The spring of '61 was cold and wet, and because construction superintendent Horace Tenney (a Madison pioneer settler) didn't have time to prepare the facility properly, the men were often cold and wet as well. The food was bad, arms and equipment were in short supply, and training and discipline were almost random.
On June 10 and 11 of 1861, several hundred new recruits on furlough terrorized Madison. One group reportedly assaulted and murdered a German woman while another drunken mob exchanged gunfire with the proprietor and patrons at Voight's Brewery at Gorham and State.
Mayor Levi Vilas called a citizens meeting to address what he called the "outrages" visited upon the city's residents, but the meeting itself almost erupted into violence, as dozens of Germans arrived with rifles.
Over the next three years, soldiers posed an increasing threat to public safety through numerous assaults, drunken brawls, insubordination and even arson at Camp Randall itself.
Blame for bad accommodations or tardy pay fell squarely on Madison men, especially Tenney and paymaster Simeon Mills, Madison's first businessman. It was also Tenney who allowed several saloons to operate within campgrounds, further eroding discipline and decorum.
Relations between the city and the camp grew even rougher after a large contingent of Wisconsin draftees started arriving in February 1864. By early fall, when the soldiers' census peaked at about 3,500 - well more than one soldier for every three city residents - there was an outright reign of terror, with soldiers committing two murders within six weeks.
Military patrols on almost every street corner gave the city the appearance of being under martial law, but without really doing much good. "Murder and highway robbery and riot have been with impunity committed against us," declared Mayor Leitch - no fan of the Union war effort even in the best of times.
We've been swindled!
Unlike the wars of the 20th century, the Civil War did not cause serious disruption of the city's economic or social life, other than that caused by the soldiers themselves. 1860 brought a bumper wheat crop, helping the Dane County economy recover from the panic of 1857.
While about one in three Wisconsin banks failed in 1861 due to heavy investment in Southern bonds, Madison banks weathered the war. Manufacturing grew, led by E.W. Skinner Co. making sorghum mills on Lake Mendota Court.
But there was a disturbing economic disparity, as inflation far outpaced the increase in wages. And the inflation in one vital item - firewood - caused lasting ecological damage, as the forests of University Heights and Maple Bluff were sacrificed to satisfy energy needs at Camp Randall and throughout the city.
Some very aggressive city borrowing had ruined city finances and left us deeply in debt. A report from the city finance committee in 1860 was blunt: "The truth is that as a city, we have been swindled and robbed and the state prison for life would be none too good for the men who have done this. We are bankrupt for the present, bankrupt for the future, bankrupt forever, unless we can effect a reasonable compromise."
A compromise would be reached and disaster averted. But this took three years to work out, and it left the city paying its debts at about 60 cents on the dollar.
Even incoming Mayor Vilas, a successful politician in his native Vermont before moving to Madison in 1850, sounded like an angry tea partier. Probably the richest man in Madison, he unloaded at his mayoral inaugural in April 1861, declaring that citizens "had been swindled" and that "taxes have become odious."
Vilas bemoaned "the corruptions of men in office, and the licentious practices that prevail upon the people in selecting them." He warned that "the imbecility and disregard of justice and right manifested in the discharge of official trusts" could result in revolution and a new government "subversive of the rights and liberties of the people."
A fortnight later, traitors fired on Fort Sumter, and we were at war.
Suffering and death
In all, 722 Madison men fought in the Civil War, taking part in battles from Pennsylvania to Georgia. There were 171 casualties. One battle - Shiloh - had two casualties that changed history.
Jairus Fairchild, one of Madison's pioneer settlers and its first mayor, had two sons. Cassius, the elder, was a rising politician and business leader. His younger brother, Lucius, was a punk. Then they went to war. One was destroyed, the other ennobled.
Cassius Fairchild was Madison's crown prince - state representative, chairman of the state Democratic Party, president of the Common Council, and manager of his father's extensive business interests, all by the time he was 32. His future was as bright as anyone's in the capital city.
As a member of the Governor's Guard militia, Cassius was one of the first volunteers mustered in when war broke out. He made major in six months, and by December 1861 was lieutenant colonel of the 16th Wisconsin.
But at the Battle of Shiloh the first week of April 1862, he was struck in the thigh so close to the hip joint that amputation was impossible and treatment dangerous. Brought home on a stretcher over a series of rivers, Cassius spent the year in agony until the musket ball could be removed.
When Jairus Fairchild built his house in 1849, he chose the best lot in the city, down from the Capitol overlooking Lake Monona. In the summer and fall 13 years later, Madison's first great house was a place of suffering and death. While Cassius was attempting to recover from his wounds, his father was dying (and would do so in October).
Cassius Fairchild returned to service in May 1863 and was twice injured, but recovered. In March 1864, he became a colonel in the 17th Army Corps, marching to the sea with Sherman.
After the close of the war, Cassius was mustered out as a brigadier general but was a broken man. He was given a sinecure appointment as United States marshal and moved to Milwaukee, where he married on Oct. 14, 1868. Ten days later, while he served as a pallbearer at a friend's funeral, his wounds ruptured and he died.
The carnage at Shiloh - the bloodiest battle in American history to that point - also led to the loss of Wisconsin's activist young governor, Louis P. Harvey. The first Republican gubernatorial candidate to carry Madison (by 25 votes), Harvey was in office only three months when he led a mission to minister to state troops that had been in the battle. But on April 19, he slipped while trying to board a boat in the dark and drowned in the swiftly moving Tennessee River - the same river that brought Cassius Fairchild home.
Harvey's death led to the creation of another famed Madison institution, the military hospital in the former Farwell mansion at Spaight and Brearly streets, which his widow, Cordelia, personally lobbied Lincoln to allow.
Lucius Fairchild, meanwhile, used the war to turn his life around. He had joined the California Gold Rush at age 18, made some money, and by his late 20s was back in Madison and somewhat adrift. But he showed skill as a soldier, commanding a regiment of the Iron Brigade through several critical battles.
A Democrat before the war, Lucius became a strong Republican and a forceful advocate for the war and abolition. He was leading a charge up Seminary Hill at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 when a musket ball shattered his left arm, leaving him "the man with the empty sleeve." Elected secretary of state that fall, Lucius was Wisconsin's first three-term governor (1866-1872), held several ambassadorial posts, and was national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic.
And it was Lucius Fairchild who pressured the state Legislature into preserving Camp Randall as an athletic facility for the UW. But for the memory of the soldiers who saved the Union, and Fairchild's personal intervention, the Ag Society's fairgrounds would have been sold off in 1893 for a large housing subdivision.
What mightn't have been
Other remnants of Civil War Madison also still exist, as the modern downtown landscape boasts many important buildings from April 1861, including Grace Episcopal Church, the Simeon Mills Historic District (King and Main streets), the Willett Main (Miles Teddywedgers) building at the head of State Street, and many of the finest homes on Mansion Hill.
September 1863 saw the dedication of a modest sandstone building on West Washington Avenue - the Shaare Shomain (Gates of Heaven) Synagogue. It was here that the Legislature met for a memorial service following Lincoln's assassination in April 1865. The building later served a variety of religious and nonreligious functions, including as the Unitarian Meeting House where Frank Lloyd Wright attended 1879-1886. In 1971, the synagogue was moved to James Madison Park.
From January to March 1862, a statue strode through Camp Randall, as Col. Hans Christian Heg drilled with his 15th "Scandinavian" Regiment. A gold-rushing "Forty-Niner" like Lucius Fairchild, Heg fell at Chickamauga in September 1863, and stands today in metallic eternity on the King Street entrance of the Capitol. Heg was the highest-ranking Wisconsin soldier to die in combat during the war.
A fortune made during the war also affects life in Madison today. The hundreds of millions of dollars William Vilas gave the city and campus began with money his father Levi was making while William was off at war. And the reason so much money came to the city and university is that William - valedictorian of the three-member Class of 1858, later a long-term regent - came home unharmed.
For Madison and Wisconsin, the most important thing about the Civil War is probably that William Vilas wasn't hurt or killed.
If he had been, the city would have lost the parks philanthropist who also gave an estate worth about $120 million to the UW (including for affirmative action scholarships). The state and nation would have lost a senator, secretary of the interior and postmaster general (who in 1887 hosted President Grover Cleveland at his mansion on the Hill).
Lt. Col. Vilas volunteered, and saw action just like the 171 Madison men who died in battle; had he met their fate, there would today be no Henry Vilas Park, no Vilas Communications Hall, not even a Vilas County.
Just as there is nothing in Madison named for Cassius Fairchild, except a tombstone.
Such are the lessons of life during wartime.
