"...save for the absolute leftmost flank of the socialist movement - and even then, a minority of that political persuasion - there was no real antiwar position to speak of. The Confederacy was the clear aggressor and not only occupied American territory but in the span of less than a month committed grievous atrocities against two major American cities and their citizenry. The Senate voted unanimously in favor of war when it reconvened in Philadelphia, and even William Jennings Bryan, though no longer a Senator and perhaps the most ferocious critic of the Hughes administration's agenda, called for "a consolidation of the national spirit and the Republic's full energy behind the expulsion of the Southron from our soil." Hughes had not intended to be a war President - indeed, part of his program for voters in the previous autumn that now felt like an eternity ago had been that he, rather than the more unpredictable Hearst, would be a steadier hand in handling the Confederacy [1] - but a war President he was, and that would require a response.
Despite all that, beneath the overwhelming unanimity of public outrage towards Richmond, there was a variety of opinion on how exactly to proceed. "Every man today is a war hawk," wrote Senator George Turner of Washington - the powerful and influential chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the President pro tem of the Senate - in a public essay, "but some are mere hatchlings." At one polar extreme was what Root came to term the "irreconcilables," led by Lodge and a hardened cadre of New Englanders and Philadelphians who made up the right wing of the Liberal Party and also the most ardently anti-Confederate politicians going back to the turn of the century. These were the men who had doubted Hughes' ascendancy to control of the party apparatus - Lodge had privately dismissed the President as "Hearst with whiskers" in his domestic compromises with Democrats and an "invertebrate" in his dealings with Hoke Smith at Niagara - and, as Yankee abolitionists, saw the war in raw ideological terms and indeed a civilizational struggle. Lodge, in an address in Trenton shortly after the fall of Baltimore, declared, "The moment is at hand to rid the world of the most vile, savage and evil regime that has ever plagued its face," and the bloodshed to come was justified largely through that lens. Though most Irreconcilables couched their anger in softer terms, they would to the man largely not be satisfied until the US Army had not only thrown the Confederacy from American soil but marched out to the very tip of Florida and freed every slave along the way.
At the other end of the spectrum, a few notches right of the IWW that was unable to see past its "pacifism at any price" position, was a multipartisan agglomeration of Congressmen and Senators from the Midwest, Plains and even Mountain West who could see the situation spiraling out of control with the entrance of three Latin powers into the conflict [2] and advocated for the ejection of the Confederacy from American territory and then pressing for terms once the United States had won a victory or two. This position included not just influential and ascendant Socialists such as Victor Berger, with whom the idea behind the so-called "Hatchlings" came to largely be associated, but also Democrats such as future Senate Majority Leader George Hodges of Kansas and Wisconsin's chief Liberal potentate, Robert La Follette. In their view, a defensive war was just, but the position of the Irreconcilables was overzealous and would cause billions in unnecessary damages and cause millions of lives to leave North America a desolate wasteland. Though outside the Senate, Bryan still commanded some respect and influence, and was perhaps the loudest and most charismatic exponent of this view.
The largest bloc landed somewhere in between these two positions and included the bulk of Congressional leadership, from Speaker Mann and Minority Leader Clark in the House to chief and key Senators of both parties, most importantly Turner and Majority Leader Kern. The view of this large cross-partisan majority was that the Confederacy should be ejected, and then humiliated, repeatedly, but the door left open to terms every step of the way if they were not unfavorable, such as the insulting secret offer made through Canadian interlocutors by Confederate agents shortly after Baltimore fell and which were rejected immediately. Hughes was himself favorable to this view, as was Root, and the "Axis Address" should be understood first and foremost as being an effort to publicly synthesize and distill this view as the stance of both the administration and the vast majority of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, for the citizenry's consumption.
The speech that largely defined Hughes' career and has come to be seen as an essential moment of Presidential oratory has lost much of its contemporary context. Hughes gave it on the steps of Independence Hall as much to draw on the symbolism of the American Revolution and cast the Great American War as its natural successor conflict ideologically as he did because no President had directly addressed Congress in over a century and he did not plan to break that precedent, [3] and also he needed space for dignitaries and journalists that several other sites in Philadelphia did not provide. Contrary to the understanding of the address today as a rallying cry, it was just as much an outlining of government policy as it was an emotional appeal to an angered nation. At the time he gave it his Presidency looked like a failed humiliation that had fled the burning capital, and contrary to pop history it was not the Axis Address but tangible victories on the Susquehanna and at Tucson, followed by the Kentucky Offensive in the spring, that turned around the fortunes and reputation of Charles Evans Hughes. He was never a talented orator, but at that moment he said what the country needed to hear; and though the twenty-five minute, two-thousand word speech is today remembered as an optimistic paean to American liberal idealism and a defense of the "unrealized principles of the revolution of 1776," it had some fairly bloodthirsty moments that promised not reconciliation but vengeance.
The address drew its name from Hughes description of the stakes: "At this moment, a bloc has formed that declares war on all we hold dear; a bloc of monarchy, of tyranny, of slavery. This force seeks to not just arrest but perhaps undo the social and economic progress made by this Republic and others in the past century, progress made towards the promise of the revolutionaries of both continents of this Hemisphere a hundred years ago, a promise it falls upon our generation to keep. Standing against this advancing column of treachery is an axis of liberty that extends from the banks of the St. Lawrence to far southern plains of Patagonia; an axis around which the project of democracy, freedom, and opportunity revolves and which our enemy seeks to break asunder."
This, along with other allusions to the "unfilled hope of 1776 and the more perfect Union we have sought to build in the shadow of that promise," is the most famous quote from this speech historically, but newspapers of the time focused on a different section since largely forgotten (or perhaps ignored) - that being Hughes' declaration: "Let us not be mistaken of the cost of the struggle ahead, of the price we will pay for our liberty. As Thomas Jefferson said, the tree of liberty is watered by the blood of patriots; but let it also be clear that the tree of our generation's liberty from threat of coercion, extortion and subversion by the Confederate States will be watered with the blood of Confederate soldiers, as we drive them back into the cottonfields from which they came. Let it also be clear, my fellow citizens, that we will never once withdraw the hand of friendship to any who will seize it - but that the hand of friendship when swatted away may form a fist, and though we desire peace, let it be clear that for every drop of blood drawn from us, ten shall be in turn spilled from them..."" [4][5]
- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes
[1] Whoops! Though to be fair, the Confederacy's choices led us to this point, regardless of what Hearst, Hughes or any other hypothetical US President of either party may have done
[2] Centro is not exactly a "power"
[3] I don't know when exactly I'll bring back spoken SOTUs before a joint session, but it won't be in the 1910s as IOTL
[4] My feeble attempt at "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with one drawn by the sword." Lincoln's second inaugural was not exactly the Kumbaya historians often make it out to be, and that's the parallel - that and Gettysburg - I'm endeavoring to draw here
[5] As an addendum, historiography - especially American historiography - is replete with things getting papered over or desensitized. What we're shooting for here is pop history basically taking Hughes channeling the very real rage of the American people to give a speech where he basically goes "you fucked around, now you're about to find out" and somehow only remember the part where he talks about freedom and liberal idealism and peace and happiness and Mom's apple pie and so on