I find no law authorizing the appointment of chaplains for our hospitals, and yet the services of chaplains are more needed, perhaps, in hospitals than with the healthy soldiers in the field. With this view I have given a sort of quasi appointment (a copy of which I enclose) to each of three Protestant ministers, who have accepted and entered upon the duties.
If you perceive no objection I will thank you to give me the name or names of one or more suitable persons of the Catholic Church to whom I may with propriety tender the same service.
Many thanks for your kind and judicious letters to Governor Seward, and which he regularly allows me the pleasure and profit of perusing.
With the highest respect. Your obedient servant,
There are conflicting opinions regarding the propriety of the “war stand” taken by the Archbishop, but it is generally agreed that he was one of the heroic figures of war times. He had the absolute confidence of President Lincoln, and on the 21st of October, 1861, was sent abroad with Thurlow Weed on a “peace commission.” The Archbishop went to France, while Mr. Weed confined his work to England. At the same time Messrs. Mason and Slidell were in Europe on a mission in the interests of the Confederacy. The late Bishop McNierny, of Albany, then a young priest in New York City, accompanied the Archbishop to France, acting in the capacity of private secretary.
These two rival “missions” to Europe were covered with all sorts of honeyed diplomatic terms, but their real purpose was well known. Messrs. Mason and Slidell went to induce one or more of the powerful nations of the old world to throw the weight of their influence with the Southern Confederacy. The mission of the Archbishop and Mr. Weed was to prevent that result.
A letter written by Archbishop Hughes to Cardinal Barnabo, at the time of his appointment by President Lincoln, goes to show that the Archbishop accepted the mission with the very highest motives. After explaining that he had refused it once and only reconsidered his refusal at the earnest request of the President, he adds: “My mission was and is a mission of peace between France and England on the one side, and the United States on the other. The time was so brief between my visit to Washington and my departure from New York that I had no opportunity of writing to your Eminence upon the subject, or of consulting any of the other Bishops in regard to it. I made it known to the President that if I should come to Europe it would not be as a partisan of the North more than of the South; that I should represent the interests of the South as well as of the North; in short, the interests of all the United States just the same as if they had not been distracted by the present civil war. The people of the South know that I am not opposed to their interests. They have even published that in their papers, and some say that my coming to Europe is with a view to bringing about a reconciliation between the two sections of the country. But in fact no one but myself, either North or South, knows the entire object of my visit to Europe.”