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.”
Abraham Lincoln faced a dilemma, thanks to a trio of Vermonters. The president was trying to put down an insurrection and reunite the country, but he wanted to do so while protecting religious freedom. The Vermonters were making it hard for him to do both.
In 1863, the Vermonters — Peter Dakin of Ferrisburgh, Lindley M. Macomber of Grand Isle, and Cyrus Pringle of Charlotte — found themselves at the heart of a potentially deadly battle with the Army over whether they could be forced, against their religious beliefs, to serve. As Quakers, they had dedicated themselves to pacifism, so they argued they could not maintain their faith and take up arms. Refusing to fight might have been more dangerous for the men than enlisting — the Army was threatening them with court-martials that could lead to imprisonment and possible execution.
Friends and relatives prodded the men to find a graceful way out. But they steadfastly refused to do anything that aided the war effort. Why not simply pay the $300 commutation fee, to buy their way out of serving, they were asked. But the men said the government would use that money to fight the war. They even rejected others’ offers to pay the fee for them.
“We confess a higher duty than that to country; and, asking no military protection of our Government and grateful for none, deny any obligation to support so unlawful a system,” explained Pringle in his journal. Much of what we know about the drama comes to us from a journal Pringle kept, which was published 50 years later, in 1913, in The Atlantic Monthly, and again as a book in 1918, during World War I.
The military shipped the men out as prisoners, hoping they would eventually obey orders. “(A)s the town clock (in Rutland) tolled the hour of seven, we were driven amongst the flock that was going forth to the slaughter, down the street and into the cars for Brattleboro,” he wrote. “…At Brattleboro we were marched up to the camp; our knapsacks and persons searched; and any articles of citizen’s dress taken from us; and then shut up in a rough board building under a guard.”
They slept on boards and ate meals consisting of burnt bread, occasionally some aging meat, and peas. But they were only passing through Brattleboro. Within two days, they were on the move again, this time to Camp Vermont, located on an island in Boston Harbor.
Before they were shipped out, Macomber and Pringle had written Gov. Frederick Holbrook, pleading their case. By simply following the “well-known principles of our Society,” the men wrote, they had been “brought into suffering and exposed to insult and contempt” and been charged with insubordination “though liberty of conscience is granted us by the Constitution of Vermont as well as that of the United States.”
Holbrook was unmoved, leaving them to their fate.
Traveling south by train, the men were informed that armed guards were under orders to shoot anyone who tried to jump from the train, or even stuck his head out the window. “All is war here,” Pringle reported of Camp Vermont. “We are surrounded by the pomp and circumstance of war, and enveloped in the cloud thereof.”
At camp, they were relieved of duty, while officers debated what to do with them. The men found themselves in a series of awkward conversations with officers who thought they could persuade the Quakers to serve. “Finding us firm and not lacking in words, they usually fly into a passion and end by bullying us,” Pringle reported. “How can we reason with such men? They are utterly unable to comprehend the pure Christianity and spirituality of our principles.”
One officer, a major, quoted the Old Testament, claiming it justified war. Then he gave the men a choice: follow orders or go to jail. They chose jail.
For company, the Vermonters had the deserters, the drunks and the disorderly. Pringle took a particular dislike to the inmates who had rioted against the draft law. These men opposed the war, not on religious grounds, but on racist ones. They had no interest in helping free Blacks. The rioters taunted the Black men in the camp with “foul and profane jeers,” Pringle wrote. “In justice to the blacks I must say they are superior to the whites in all their behaviour.”
Several days later, the Vermonters were brought before a military tribunal, Pringle wrote, where Dakin was “asked if he would die first (before obeying orders), and replied promptly but mildly, Yes.”
A sergeant, with two privates in tow, removed Macomber from jail one day and ordered him to do some task. With guns loaded, they badgered Macomber to submit, to make this small contribution to the war effort, but he refused and was soon returned to the guardhouse. “This is a trial of strength of patience,” wrote Pringle.
Soon the men were shipped by steamer to a base outside Washington. There, they tried to explain the situation to junior officers who had been ordered to outfit them with rifles. The officers, who Pringle wrote exhibited “pride, vanity, conceit, and an arbitrary spirit,” were uninterested in religious debate. The officers ordered rifles to be forcibly thrust over the men’s heads and slug by their straps on their shoulders.
The Vermonters were then marched with the rest of the unit south into Virginia. Short on food and without water, Dakin dropped from exhaustion, but managed to complete the march. Along the way, they witnessed that “upon these fields of Virginia, once so fair, there rests a two-fold blight, first that of slavery, now that of war.”
As they neared the front, officers grew impatient with them. When the Vermonters refused to attend an inspection of arms, a colonel ordered them tied up and seated on the ground. After two or three hours, they were untied and put under guard. They slept that night in the open. The next day, officers told them they must obey orders or suffer “great severities and even death.”
The colonel later apologized for their rough treatment, but said that “if we persisted in our course, death would probably follow,” Pringle wrote. The officer suggested they accept a transfer to work at a hospital. Other Quakers, he argued, believed that such service was in keeping with the religion’s dictates. But the men were not swayed. To take a hospital job, they explained, would free another man to fight.
The men’s treatment alternated between kind and harsh. One day Pringle was tied up for two hours for refusing to clean his gun. Several days later, the colonel promised to protect the men from the threats they were receiving from other soldiers.
But later, when Pringle again refused to clean his gun, two sergeants ordered him to lie on his back, then “stretching my limbs apart(,) tied cords to my wrists and ankles and these to four stakes driven in the ground somewhat in the form of an X. I was very quiet in my mind as I lay there on the ground [soaked] with the rain of the previous day, exposed to the heat of the sun, and suffering keenly from the cords binding my wrists and straining my muscles.”
After an hour, a lieutenant asked again if he would clean his gun. When Pringle refused, he was left there for another hour before being released. “I wondered if it could be that they could force me to obedience by torture,” he wrote. But though he was “weaker in body,” he said he remained “firm in my resolution to maintain my allegiance to my Master.”
Soon afterward (perhaps the next morning), the lieutenant told Pringle that he, Dakin and Macomber had been ordered to report to Washington. This order they gladly obeyed.
The three Vermonters met with U.S. Agriculture Commissioner Isaac Newton, who had brought their case and that of two Massachusetts Quakers to the attention of President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Lincoln and Stanton sympathized with the Quakers’ hardships, but were bound by the strictures of the draft law.
They offered the Vermonters a way out, however. They could serve at a hospital whose nurses were hired civilians. Their presence wouldn’t free anyone to fight. The men accepted the offer and worked for months at the hospital before returning to Vermont.
Lindley Macomber moved to Ferrisburgh shortly after returning home and worked as a horticulturalist. And within months of their return, he and Dakin became brothers-in-law. Macomber married Lydia Dakin, Peter’s sister, in September 1864. Whether they knew each other through a network of Vermont Quakers, or if Peter introduced her to his new friend, is unclear.
Having survived his ordeal, Cyrus Pringle went on to become one of the most important botanists of the 19th century. His botanical discoveries in his native state, as well as on long expeditions in the Southwestern United States and in Mexico, proved groundbreaking. He preserved more than a half-million plant specimens during his 35-year-long career, and discovered roughly 1,200 plant species previously unknown to science.
Correction: Peter Dakin was born (and died) in Ferrisburgh. A reader reports that some Civil War references mistakenly say he was from Bridport.
