Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
It is undoubtedly one of Vermont’s most important Civil War documents. It dates from the very first days of the war and foreshadows so much of what was to come. On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops in South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter, signaling that they would not countenance the presence of federal authority on their soil. War was at hand and the nation’s capital was under threat.
President Abraham Lincoln knew he must rally the country, or at least the northern half, for what lay ahead. As part of that effort, Lincoln sent a telegram to Vermont Gov. Erastus Fairbanks. The note, marked “Strictly private and confidential,” read: “Washington is in grave danger. What may we expect of Vermont? – A. Lincoln.”
Fairbanks responded with one sentence, but it was all Lincoln needed to hear: “Vermont will do its full duty.”
If anything, Fairbanks underestimated the effort Vermont would exert in the conflict: The state would send more than 34,000 men to war and more than a third of them would end up as casualties – killed, wounded, captured or missing.
In six words, Fairbanks captured Vermont’s Civil War experience.
In recent decades, historians have been drawn to the message because of the strength and conviction it conveys, as well as its prophetic power. The telegram inspired the title for writer Howard Coffin’s 1993 history of Vermonters in the war, “Full Duty.” Coffin’s book helped bring the telegram to the public’s attention.
Despite his book’s title, Coffin made clear in “Full Duty” that “it is believed” that Fairbanks used those words to reply to Lincoln. Coffin had to be cautious. All that historians have to work with today is the word of others that the telegram even existed. The telegram itself is missing. The document may still exist, but it isn’t in a large public collection of Vermont papers.
Still, we have tantalizing clues that the story about Fairbanks’ reply is true. The best evidence is a typewritten note in the collection of the Vermont State Archives from Mary Green Nye, who was editor of state papers from 1927 to 1950. While going through Fairbanks’ official papers, Nye apparently found an intriguing telegraph form.
“And on the back of the telegraph blank,” Nye wrote, “is penciled in the governor’s handwriting what was probably his reply: VERMONT WILL DO ITS FULL DUTY.”
Historians have tended to agree with Nye that Fairbanks’ penciled note was how he informed a telegraph operator to respond to Lincoln.
Historians believe that a couple of 19th century Vermonters could have run across the telegram during and after the war. Randolph native Albert B. Chandler, who worked as a telegraph operator and cipher in the War Department, and who was friendly with Lincoln, might have saved the original for the Fairbanks family. (Chandler later became rich as a pioneer in the communications industry and donated a music hall to his hometown.) Or perhaps George Grenville Benedict, who published the first comprehensive history of Vermont during the Civil War in 1889, came upon the document in assembling his opus.
There are just so many gaps in our knowledge about the telegram. “The story is there is no story,” warned former State Archivist Gregory Sanford, “therefore there’s lots of mythology.”
John A. Williams, who served as editor of state papers after Nye, offered another clue. He left a note in the file, dated April 1970, explaining that an Arthur Fairbanks Stone, a Fairbanks descendent, had published a book in 1929 entitled “Vermont of Today.” In his book, Stone said that the telegram was still in the family’s possession. But after Stone’s death, Williams wrote, his Fairbanks papers were sold privately. Williams had it on the authority of the late Graham Newell, an expert on St. Johnsbury history and former president of the Vermont Historical Society, that the telegram was included in the sale.
Despite the mystery surrounding the telegram, Howard Coffin chose to title his book after it. Indeed, as he was preparing the book for publication, his editor, Peter Jennison, had independently come up with the same title.
Coffin noted that Lincoln was similarly famed for his brevity, exemplified in his Gettysburg Address, which was all of 272 words. “So it was a perfect reply to Lincoln,” Coffin said.
Coffin found himself drawn to the telegram because of Fairbanks’ terse response to Lincoln. “It is that wonderful economy of words that Vermonters are supposed to be famous for,” Coffin said. “There it is right there; that’s all he had to say.”
Lincoln was no doubt more impressed by the commitment that backed up those words. After receiving Lincoln’s telegram, Fairbanks convened the Vermont Legislature and asked it to appropriate $500,000 for the war effort, which was then a hefty sum. Gripped by fervor for the Union cause, lawmakers doubled the request, approving $1 million. News of the generous gesture made newspapers as far away as London.
Many Vermonters gave something more precious than money, their lives. At a time when the state’s population was 315,000, or slightly less than half what it is today, more than 5,200 Vermonters died.
Even if Fairbanks’ telegram can’t be located, the message it purportedly conveyed continues to inform us, in its succinct way, of the sacrifices Vermonters made.
A reader follows up on last week’s story about Ernest Gibson Jr.: Why did a Democratic president nominate a former Vermont Republican governor to be a federal judge? Read the Postscript here.
