Cincinnati Speech

The Federalist Society chapter at the University of Cincinnati College of Law has renamed itself after Norton Parker Chipman, an 1859 graduate of the law school. Terry Flanigan has painted a portrait of Chipman for the University, and I have put together two panels commemorating Chipman for display at the law school. My April 4 speech at a program of the chapter recounts Chipman's life and notes, though without embellishment, some parallels between the Civil War era and today's society.

My speech:

My remarks are about Norton Parker Chipman, Cincinnati Law School class of 1859, but they are also about the similarities between today and the Civil War era. We are sometimes tempted to believe that what we face is unique. We do so at our own peril, however, when we fail to see the parallels in history. I won’t take the time to point them all out to you today. But, if you have been paying attention to politics the last few years, you will recognize some of them.

During the last year and a half of the Civil War, the South maintained a prisoner of war camp at Andersonville, Georgia. Hastily built, the camp was grossly inadequate for housing captured Union soldiers. No shelters were built, so the first prisoners erected crude shelters from debris or dug pits in the ground. The water system consisted of a small stream that flowed through the stockade. It soon became polluted from upstream activities and the prisoners’ own waste.

The prison population grew rapidly in the summer of 1864, and by August there were 33,000 prisoners contained in a stockade measuring only 26.5 acres. That is similar to taking every full-time and part-time undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Cincinnati or the population of a small city and placing that population to live 24 hours a day on a parking lot the size of the site on which stands the Great American Ball Park. Supplies were short throughout the South, and Andersonville was no exception. Food was often scarce or of poor quality. Disease ran rampant in the close quarters. And men died in droves from malnutrition, exposure, and gangrene. Of almost 50,000 men who were imprisoned at Andersonville, about 13,000 died there.

News of the horrendous conditions and severe suffering at Andersonville filtered into the North, igniting a firestorm of public indignation. Reports of the Andersonville prison keeper found their way into the northern press. Not just his neglect, but his intentional cruelty to the prisoners, caused public outcry, with Northerners calling the head of Henry Wirz, the demon of Andersonville.

After Robert E. Lee’s Appomattox surrender, many Confederate leaders panicked and fled, even though the North had no intention of holding most of them personally responsible for the rebellion. Some fled when no one pursued. But the North made it a point to capture Wirz and bring him to Washington to be tried for war crimes.

With the Judge Advocate General absorbed in the prosecution of conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton turned to his trusted 31-year-old aide, Norton Parker Chipman, to take on the task of prosecuting Wirz. Chipman had just turned down President Andrew Johnson’s offer to be the president’s personal secretary and was determined to open up his own law practice in Washington, but he responded to Stanton’s call to further military duty as he had since April 1961, when we has the first person in his hometown of Washington, Iowa, to respond to President Lincoln’s call for volunteers to oppose the Rebellion.

After several months of investigation, Chipman brought charges against Wirz before a military commission. As the trial got underway, Chipman became a household name. Newspapers throughout the country reported each day’s proceedings, giving detailed descriptions of the participants in the trial. Newspapers in the North clamored for justice, while newspapers in the South condemned the trial as judicial murder and criticized Wirz’s confinement as illegal. After several weeks of testimony, the commission convicted Wirz of war crimes and murder, and he was hanged in the Old Capitol Prison.

In 1957, on a live television program called “Climax!,” Charlton Heston played Chipman in an episode called “The Trial of Captain Wirz.” On Broadway in 1959 and 1960, George C. Scott starred as Chipman in “The Andersonville Trial” -- a role for which Scott was nominated for a Tony Award. William Shatner played Chipman in the 1970 made-for-television movie “The Andersonville Trial.” The movie was nominated for five Emmy Awards and won three, including Outstanding Single Program. That puts Chipman in a league with Moses, General George S. Patton, Jr., and Captain James T. Kirk. Yet no book has ever been written about him or with him as a main character. Even in his own account of the trial of Wirz, Chipman makes himself only a minor character. As former Presiding Justice Robert K. Puglia, a successor to Chipman’s judicial seat, once said, “Chipman deserves a book.”

Recognized in 1865 by the nation as the Andersonville prosecutor, Chipman was known to military and government leaders long before. After law school, he practiced law in Iowa. He immediately became an officer when he volunteered in the War Against the Rebellion in 1861. The North was mostly united behind Lincoln’s determination not to allow the rupture of the Union. (Think of the unity seen in the days and weeks after September 11, 2001.)

By the time he fought in the Battle of Fort Donelson in February 1862, Chipman was major of his regiment. When General Ulyssess S. Grant gave orders to storm the garrison, Chipman led the charge up the hill. At first, an eery silence greeted the regiment. But, as the men approached a ridge, the Confederates opened fire. Two of the early shots ripped through Chipman’s right thigh, knocking him to the ground. His comrades rushed to his aid, but he ordered them to advance and leave him. The next day his regiment was given the honor of being first to march into the surrendered fort, but Chipman was already on a steamer headed up the river for treatment.

After he recovered, Chipman received a promotion to colonel and accepted an assignment from General Samuel Curtis to serve as his chief of staff. As Curtis commanded the Department of the Missouri, Chipman became his right hand. But adversaries plotted to remove Curtis from power. Political strife with the civil authorities and nefarious allegations that Curtis had engaged in illegal cotton trading with the South prompted Lincoln to relieve Curtis of his command. Curtis immediately sent Chipman to Washington to defend against the allegations. Chipman successfully pled Curtis’ case, and Lincoln restored Curtis to command, though in Kansas.

Lincoln and Stanton took notice of the 29-year-old colonel and decided his services were needed in the War Department. Chipman’s first big assignment from Stanton was to accompany Lincoln to the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg. As Lincoln gave the two-minute speech that has become one of the classics of all time, Chipman sat near him on the speaker’s platform. Chipman remembered:

I stood by his side at Gettysburg when he delivered that marvelously beautiful tribute to the noble dead who lay at his feet. I saw him when with clear and almost angelic voice he urged his care-furrowed face towards the sky and uttered those immortal lines, speaking as one inspired, and as though in the very presence of the throne of God!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Here, everywhere, and always, he seemed to me to be personifying the intense and awful strain of one standing for a Nation and vicariously bearing its burdens.

From October 1863 to the end of the war in 1865, Chipman split time between prosecuting offenses before military commissions and taking personal assignments from Lincoln and Stanton. When Confederate General Jubal Early attacked Washington, Stanton sent Chipman on a hasty nighttime mission to survey the city’s defenses and report back by morning. Within weeks, as General Philip Sheridan marched through the Shenandoah Valley, Lincoln sent Chipman, along with a cavalry escort, to take the president’s dispatches to Sheridan, warning Sheridan of Lee’s efforts to send reinforcements to block Sheridan’s advance.

By 1863, two years into the war, deep divisions manifested themselves in the North. Many northerners had long since tired of supporting the war, especially as Lincoln made it an aim of the war to emancipate the slaves, not just preserve the Union. Election politics intensified the debate and the rhetoric. Chipman returned to Iowa, where he was well-known for his service, and gave a speech in support of Lincoln’s policies. Listen in this excerpt for arguments you may have heard more recently:

When the first gun of the rebellion echoed back from Sumter’s walls its sound of contending arms, you remember how every patriot heart thrilled, and with what enthusiasm the people responded to the call for aid. No one stopped to discuss the question of duty then, and the man who doubted the ability of the Government to maintain its own life or questioned its right to do so was tenderly cared for as insane or openly spurned as an ingrate and a traitor. These men were few, very few then and breathed their pestilent treason in caves and at night, for popular indignation would have crushed them under its mighty wheels. I do not forget the night this county enrolled its first company in the great army of freedom, and pledged it to the country for real or for woe for years or for ages, for life or for death. But one sentiment prevailed. All hearts beat in unison. Pure, devoted, disinterested, self-sacrificing patriotism was the feeling which, stronger than the ties of home, of friends, of business, severed each and dispelled alike the bright dreams of youth’s ambition and the pleasant reveries of green old age.

Addressing the growing public sentiment against the war, Chipman said:

Patriotism is devoted, constant, absorbing, and though it sleeps, it never goes out or takes up the cudgel against itself. If there is a hope of ultimate success and the regeneration of our country, let us stand upon it. That there is such hope no true patriot doubts. Let me tell you that it is not the bayonets alone that end wars, nor the lack of their vigorous use that prolongs them, but that very much rests with the public sentiment at home. If all that force known in politics as “outside pressure,” which is used and misused to govern our nation, could be brought to embrace the rebellion, the enemy might be pressed into submission by it alone. You who remain at home are responsible for your words, as are soldiers for their bullets. You have more right to talk against the president or government than have they to shoot in that direction. Everything said and done detrimental to the common cause is unpatriotic and just as far is he not a patriot as he indulges in this abuse of the powers that be. There is a class of men whom for want of a milder term I call growlers. They are loyal I think and really wish our government to succeed, but they have no very high ideas of the interests involved in this struggle and catch no brighter glimpse of the coming glory of America than they can get in looking back into the past, when all was peace and quiet in the country, when freedom and slavery walked hand in hand, truth and error slept side by side and no one seemed to question that they were born of the same parents. These are men who have never felt one genuine patriotic thrill in their lives, under their incrustations of self, a way down deep in their hearts as can be. They are not patriots. They are loyal but have not that noblest passion which characterizes the citizen. This is what I mean and be assured there is a difference between loyalty and patriotism. They always take the worst view of everything.

Chipman chided the Democrats and the press for their pessimism. And he warned that if the North were to lose the war, it would be because of internal division, not the South’s might.

The indelible impression on Chipman left by the Gettysburg Address was to be equaled on April 14, 1865. Richmond had fallen; Lee had surrendered; Washington was ablaze in celebration. Always attentive to duty, Chipman was working in the evening in the Bureau of Military Justice. His bride of ten weeks was out with other prominent women enjoying the sense of relief. At a late hour, Mrs. Chipman burst into Chipman’s office with a horrified look on her face. It must have brought a chill to Chipman’s blood just to see her in such a state. “Oh dear!” she exclaimed. “They shot the President in the theater!” Chipman sent his assistant to the theater to discover Lincoln’s condition. And when the assistant returned with grim news, Chipman took to the streets with the rest of the city. What he described as an “ominous rumbling” replaced the celebratory mood. Chipman’s vigil on the streets ended the next morning when news emerged from the residence across the street from the theater that Lincoln had died.

Chipman lived nearly 60 years after the Civil War and was often called upon to recount his experiences and his association with Lincoln. Here is a flavor of his respect, almost reverence, for Lincoln, closing a speech he gave in 1906:

This is Lincoln as he was manifested to me, and as I still see him -- a grand and noble man. Since the coming of the Savior of mankind the human race has been blessed by no other so great a benefactor.

There can be no doubt, there never will arise a doubt in the ages to come, that ABRAHAM LINCOLN was the most heroic, the most exalted character in American history.

High praise!

For Chipman’s meritorious service during the war and in the Bureau of Military Justice, Chipman was brevetted as a brigadier general and mustered out of service. He joined with thousands of veterans of the Union Army to form an organization known as the Grand Army of the Republic. Eventually boasting more than 400,000 members, the GAR was a powerful political force. In 1868, while Chipman served as adjutant general of the GAR, he learned from a comrade of a tradition in Europe of setting aside a day to honor those fallen in war by decorating the graves of the deceased. From this idea, Chipman drafted General Order No. 11. Signed by the GAR commander-in-chief, this order established what would later be known as Memorial Day.

Chipman stayed in Washington, where he practiced law. His most famous case, after the Andersonville Trial, was his defense of Ely Parker before a congressional inquiry of alleged corruption. Parker, a Seneca Indian chief, served as Grant’s military secretary during the war. Later, Grant appointed Parker as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, but corruption within Parker’s bureau reflected poorly on him and Congress called on him to answer. Grant obtained Chipman’s services to defend Parker, and Chipman succeeded in exonerating his friend.

In 1871, with the Republicans still firmly entrenched in power, Grant appointed Chipman as secretary of the District of Columbia. That same year, Chipman ran against Frederick Douglass, the former slave, for the Republican nomination to be the district’s delegate to the House of Representatives. He narrowly defeated Douglass.

In Congress, Chipman could not vote; nonetheless, he spearheaded the drive to obtain funding and complete the Washington Monument which had stood for many years only half built, much to the embarrassment of the nation. Although he mostly avoided the reconstruction debate, the intense politics of the era wore on him. The Republicans held power, but in many instances that power was abused for individual gain. Chipman never participated in this graft, but it left him disillusioned. Finally, his health suffered and, after serving two terms in Congress, he emigrated to California.

Let me pause here to add some details about Chipman’s personal life. The Chipmans descended from Mayflower immigrants. His parents were both Vermont natives but met and married in Ohio, where Chipman was born. The family moved to Iowa when Chipman was a young teenager. He called Iowa home until he married Mary Isabel Holmes, known to her friends as Belle, of St. Louis, in January 1865, and established a home in Washington, D.C. The Chipmans had three children, a son who died in infancy in Washington, and two daughters, both adopted, one in Washington and one in California. Belle died in 1919, after 54 years of happy marriage, leaving Chipman to mourn for his faithful and dear companion.

Returning to the timeline . . .

In California, Chipman yielded to the enticements of the Gilded Age to get rich and live comfortably. He realized the mounting need for lumber in California and around the globe and noticed the bounty of timber in Northern California. With the financial backing of Alvinza Hayward, who made his fortune on Nevada silver, Chipman bought up land and timber rights, eventually controlling more land than any other Californian. His company, Sierra Flume and Lumber Company, started out big, shipping lumber throughout California and through San Francisco to many foreign countries. Just as he was most vulnerable because of financial leverage, the Bank of California failed and, in the financial panic that followed, Sierra Flume and Lumber went bankrupt. It was Chipman’s one and only private venture, if one does not include his law practice.

With renewed interest in public service, Chipman became president of the California State Board of Trade, promoting California as an ideal place for agricultural and business interests. He served for more than 20 years until the California Supreme Court recruited him as a commissioner to help with the court’s overwhelming backload. In 1905, California established an intermediate appellate court system, the Court of Appeal. Seeking to give the new court instant prestige, Governor George Pardee appointed 71-year-old Chipman as the presiding justice of the Third Appellate District in Sacramento. You might have thought Chipman would see it as a crowning achievement in a lifetime of service and retire after a couple of years. Instead, he served as presiding justice for 16 years, retiring at the age of 87 only because of failing health. Glaucoma had essentially rendered him blind. He lived three more years, in the homes of his two daughters, and passed away in 1924, just a month shy of his 90th birthday.

Norton Parker Chipman’s legacy is not one of buildings named in his honor or foundations established in his name. When he retired from the Court of Appeal with only his Civil War pension of $72 dollars per month, he offered his collection of personal correspondence and scrapbooks to the California State Library but warned that he couldn’t imagine that anyone other than his two daughters would be interested in them. Chipman’s humility obscured his view of the great good he accomplished and helped others accomplish through his long life. Most who have heard of him know him as the Andersonville prosecutor. Yet through 60 years of public service, physical injury, dangerous missions, zealous prosecution, respectful memorializing, effective representation, and erudite decision making, Chipman, in his quiet way, helped to preserve the Union, emancipate the slaves, govern the country, civilize the West, and establish the proud tradition of the California Court of Appeal. He deserves a place in our collective memory.