The Morris County chronicle. [volume] (Morristown, N.J.) 1877-1915, 1899-09-22
A PARTIAL PARALLEL.


OF which Captain Dreyfus has been
made victim is said to be without a
parallel in our own country, the mill
tary trial in France can hardly be
said to be without at least a partial
parallel in the United States. In this
vein and commenting at length the
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin says
The most daring, persistent and de-
termined perversion of Justice in the
case of an innocent soldier who had
incurred the ill-will of his superior in
authority, was the punishment which
was imposed upon Fitz-John Por-
ter and from which no vindication
came to him for more than twenty
years. A remembrance of this case
will show us that the sacrifice of a
gulltless man to judgement of in
fanny at the hands of military court
sustained by public opinion is not a
crime for which France alone may be
impeached.
Fitz-J ohm Porter was one of the
most accomplished of the West
Pointers who entered the armies of
the Union. He had been brave in the
Mexican war; he had performed dill
gent service in opening the Northern
Central Railroad to Baltimore with
the cooperation of Don Cameron, and
his conceded merit and gallant con-
duct caused him to be advanced rapid
ly IN the early stages of the war to
the position Of a corps commander.
Late in the summer of 1862 his corps
attached IT, 10 +l1o
commanded by General John Pope at
the second battle of Bull Run. The
popular clamor which followed that
disaster was intense. The charge was
freely bruited that men high in COM
mand were disloyal or deliberately ex-
posing Washington to an attack by
the Confederates. The War Office had
already become a hotbed of fractional
lntrlgues and cabals. In the midst of
the excitement General Pope declared
that Porter had failed to carry out an
order which he had sent to him; that
the 1nactlon of Porter's corps at
critical point in the engagement was
responsible for the defeat, and that
his conduct had been that of either a
coward or traitor. The charge soon
stirred Stanton to action. Porter was
a Democrat, before the war he had been
a friend of southern men high in the
Confederate service; he was, more
over the friend of General Mcclellan,
and Stanton had made up his mind to
crush Mcclellan and his partisans in
the army. Accordingly toward the
close of the year 1862 court martial
was convened for the trial of the sus-
pected general. In that tribunal were
such officers as David Hunter and
James A. Garfield The friends of
Porter declared that it had been Or
ganized by Stanton and the War Office
to convict him at any cost During
a perod longer than that of the Drey-
fus trial it listened to the testimony
that he had disobeyed orders, that
Pope's plans had failed because of
this disobedience, and that it could
have been the result of only gross inn
competence or downright treason. AL
testimony that served to excuse Por-
ter or to explain his seeming delin-
quency was rejected. Throughout the
country there was a vehement de-
mand from radical Unionists that the
death penalty should be inflicted up
on him as traitor. The flood gates
OF defamation We're opened. Thous-
ands of honest men who would have
scorned the thought of injuring an
innocent man were carried away by
the tide of passion and believed the
accused officer to be scoundrel and
coward. The court-martial found
him guilty. To the intense pleasure
of Stanton and his associates Porter
was cashiered out of the army with
every mark of public opprobium, de-
prived of his citizenship and forever
from holding office; and
so just man as Abraham Lincoln APP
proved the sentence.
But in the meantime a powerful
voice had been raised for Justice,
coming whence it was least expected.
1t came from one who had long since
closed his mind to further argument
in the matter. 1t was the voice of
General Grant In an article in the
North American Review in 1882,
under the title of can Undeseryed
Stigma" the great soldier, then liv-
ing in the retirement of private life,
announced that he had again made
study of the case. He avowed that
he had been guilty of mistake
that he was now convinced beyond
any donbt of Porter's innocence and
that it was the clear duty of his
country TODD justice to him. The late
Mr.. Childs was in the habit of saving
that one OF the keenest regrets which
General Grant then expressed to him
was that he could not have under
stood the true situation when it was
easily within his power as president
to have had the wrong repaired. He
was satisfied that this country had
never treated man as badly as Por-
ter had been, and he wanted to do
everything to have the wrong
righted. General Grant lived for
three years after he wrote his famous
vindication of the officer. But he
did not live long enough to see the
final act of justice The major por-
ton of the Republicans in Congress
continued to oppose it for various
reasons, either the old ones or tech
nical ones, throughout the rest of
Arthur's administration. 1t was not
until the first Cleveland administra-
ton, or twenty -four years after the
court-martial, that Fitz-John Por-
ter was relieved at last of the SUI
preme infamy with which passion and
misinformation and ignorance had
branded him in the hour of national
frenzy.
And, by the by, it was French
man, the Count of Paris, who, if he
did not absolutely acquit Porter
when he came to write his history of