AND THE WAR CAME

The Six Months That Tore America Apart

Jamie Malanowski

BYLINER ORIGINALS

Copyright © 2011 by Jamie Malanowski
All rights reserved

Cover photograph: Alexander Gardner, circa 1863
Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19301

ISBN: 978-1-61452-000-9

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my beloved daughter Cara,
with Kentucky in her sights

Table of Contents

Foreword
1: Will Lincoln Prevail?
2: The North Picks a President—Now What?
3: Would the South Really Leave?
4: A Superabundance of Velocity
5: Drama in Milledgeville
6: Off the Record, Behind the Scenes
7: Buchanan: Too Little, Too Late
8: Will the North Bend or Hold?
9: The Government Disintegrates as the Union Dissolves
10: A Coup de Main in Charleston Harbor
11: War in the Cabinet
12: Is This War?
13: Avoiding War, Rejecting Peace
14: Showdown in Georgia
15: Two Out, One In
16: Cold Hopes, Warm Dreams, Chilly Schemes
17: Two Journeys, Destination Unknown
18: A Circumspect President, a Furtive President-Elect
19: Many Mouths, Few Ears
20: The First Trick
21: A Letter from the Postmaster
22: Holding Actions
23: The Choice Is Charybdis
24: Chaos and Confusion
25: The Clarion Notes of Defiance
26: Patriots and Traitors
Acknowledgments
About the Author

Foreword

I WAS RECENTLY STRUCK by an observation that may have long been tired and obvious to nearly everyone, but that seemed fresh and insightful to me: The way we learn about history is strikingly at odds with the way we experience current events and life in general. History is presented to us as a kind of orderly flow, weaving around big landmark moments like Prohibition and the Depression and World War II. Life, on the other hand, comes to us all at once in a big disorderly mess. And while we try to make sense of all this turbulence, it is almost impossible to know for sure which event, large or small, will turn out to be the one on which the fate of millions will ultimately depend.

The problem with learning about these landmarks is that the truth of our history resides in the details. The true causes of events get left out of the viewfinder when we focus on outcomes. Our leaders lose their humanity when we concentrate on their decisions and neglect their indecisions, not to mention their evasions, blind spots, and mistakes. We tend to think of ourselves as the product of destiny, which has moved in a straight line of progress to reach our times, rather than seeing ourselves as the product of thousands of actions and inactions, most of which could have gone another way.

This is the story of the six months between the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 and the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861. It was, perhaps, the most intensely political period in American history: The nation had to choose a president from among four candidates; the residents of the fifteen states where slavery was legal had to decide whether or not to leave the Union; those states that chose to leave then had to decide whether to form a new government; the federal government, officially led by an ineffectual lame-duck president as a powerless president-elect spent four months standing by, had to formulate a response from options that ranged from appeasement to war. But at the start of this period, only a tiny minority of Americans would have believed that a titanic struggle lurked just beyond the horizon.

In telling this story, an effort was made to recount the events of the Secession Winter in something like real time, weekly segments that try to comprehend the developments as they happened, trying as best as possible to ignore how things turned out. That is, of course, a fiction—we know all too well that 650,000 people ended up dead, nearly $7 billion (in today’s dollars) was expended, a civilization was destroyed, and black Americans escaped slavery into a century of segregation and struggle. But by knowing the ending, we can view all the preceding moments as opportunities when something different might have happened—and at least have the chance to bring that same awareness to what we see happening today.

October 1860

1.

Will Lincoln Prevail?

October 31, 1860

SEVEN DAYS TO GO until election day, and the campaigns are reaching a rousing climax. In Manhattan, the at-long-last-united Tammany and Mozart Democrats mass in the evenings under torch lights and stomp up and down Broadway bellowing for their man Stephen Douglas, while in cities and towns upstate, young Republican Wide Awakes holler and whistle for their tiger Abraham Lincoln. Apple farmers fear for their crops, as there is hardly a basket that has not already been overturned and had a surrogate speaker installed on top. The outcome of one of the bitterest presidential elections in the history of the republic—or perhaps only the beginning of the outcome—is falling squarely on the shoulders of New York.

Earlier this year, when Lincoln, the Illini lawyer, looked at the electoral map, he made a stunning discovery: If he could win sixteen of the eighteen Northern states, plus the Western states of California and Oregon, he would have enough votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency.

Forget the tempestuous South; even if every Southern state fell into line behind one of his rivals—Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, Senator John Bell of Tennessee, Vice President John Breckinridge of Kentucky, the squabbling standard bearers of the factions of the suicidally splintered Democratic Party—Lincoln could win with just the votes of the increasingly populated, firmly Free State North. And after the results from the state elections earlier this month—Pennsylvania had been suspect and Indiana iffy, but both tilted decisively toward the Republicans—the erstwhile rail-splitter looked like he just might convert his audacious gamble.

But one of Lincoln’s anti-slavery sixteen has always needed to be New York, with its muscular thirty-five electoral votes that are more than a fifth of the 152 needed to win.

And the race in New York, once thought to be a breeze, has tightened. In the past week, Thurlow Weed, the Republican Party political boss known for his unsavory methods and infallible acumen, has taken on a decidedly dyspeptic expression. The perpetually feuding Democratic factions in New York City finally coalesced behind Douglas, and the Democratic money spigots have begun to gush.

Simultaneously, chagrined Republicans across the state report that they had spent far too lavishly during the easygoing summer, and now have little or nothing left for the final push. “We are gaining so rapidly it is impossible to foretell the result,” Douglas’s man George Sanders has been telling associates.

Impossible indeed. Even if Douglas was able to capture the Empire State, the Little Giant has no chance of winning an Electoral College victory straight up. The Southern Democrats who walked out on him at their convention in the spring will surely snub him once again. They will split their votes between Breckinridge and Bell. Should Douglas snatch New York from Lincoln, no candidate will be able to claim a majority.

The choice next week, then, is not only between Lincoln and Douglas. It is, to put it another way, a choice between having someone clearly entitled to call himself president-elect (if Lincoln prevails), and muddy irresolution that will yield a second phase of electioneering to be held according to the secret and arcane processes of the House of Representatives. Our previous experiences with this process has shown it to be rife with pitfalls. In 1800, a deadlocked House nearly elected Aaron Burr, a man who had gone into the election hoping, at most, to become vice president. In 1824, the House picked John Quincy Adams instead of Andrew Jackson, the man who had actually received the most electoral votes (but just a plurality, not a majority).

Should Douglas take New York, the Adams-Jackson scenario is almost certain to reoccur. Lincoln’s popular and Electoral College pluralities will not factor. In the House, each state delegation gets one vote; to win the presidency, a candidate needs the votes of at least seventeen of the thirty-three states. The Republicans control fifteen delegations, the Democrats fourteen, the American Party (heir of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings) controls one. Maryland, Kentucky, and North Carolina are split, but Douglas has no support among the voters of those states.

It’s conceivable that Lincoln could wrestle away his home state, Illinois; the Democrats outnumber Republicans in that delegation five to four, but Lincoln is enormously popular and might take it. That would still leave him one frustratingly elusive vote short, with virtually no chance of finding it among the staunchly pro-slavery delegations that remain. In a real sense then, next week we will witness not one election among four men, but two elections between two pairs: Lincoln vs. Douglas in New York, to see whether Honest Abe will be able to fill his inside straight; and should he fail, a secondary contest, Breckinridge vs. Bell, to see which of the pro-slavery candidates will enter the House proceedings as the favorite to exit as president.

But let’s not get ahead of events. Thurlow Weed never likes losing elections, and he will be especially loath to lose the presidency in his own backyard. Already his appeals to Lincoln headquarters in Springfield have resulted in more campaign funds. Moreover, a veritable regiment of Republican big shots have been burning up the rails moving from Buffalo and Long Island and all points between, praising the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket. “New York is the Democrats’ forlorn hope,” James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald, wrote last week. Exactly—and Thurlow Weed aims to crush it.

Verbatim

All This Is to Be Changed

Chicago Daily Democrat (Illinois), October 31, 1860

Who are these men who have lauded it so long and so despotically over the freemen of the North? They are men who dreamed of freedom in a slave’s embrace, and waking, sold her offspring and their own to slavery. They are men who prated of freedom for the sake of establishing and perpetuating slavery; who boasted of liberty that they might exercise despotism; who vaunted their own prowess and chivalry that they might conceal their in[n]ate cowardice and meanness. Wedded to a system so barbarous that its reflex influence had made barbarians of them, they assumed for themselves the possession of all the graces and virtues of life, and dictated to the rest of the nation what should be considered the tests of refinement and gentility. . . .

Now all this is to be changed. Liberty, and not Slavery, is henceforth to be the end of the government. It is to be administered for Freedom and not for Slavery. The fitness of an applicant for office will be estimated, not by his devotion to Slavery, but by his devotion to Freedom. The government will return to the policy of the fathers, and slavery will be placed in the process of ultimate extinction. . . .

The slave States can keep their barbarous system of slavery to themselves, but they can no longer force it upon us. We will let them alone. We will surround them with a cordon of Free States, as with a wall of fire. We will hem them in, on all sides, by free and happy communities, rejoicing in perfect liberty, and progressing toward national and social greatness.

What Shall the South Carolina Legislature Do?

Charleston Mercury (South Carolina), November 3, 1860

The issue before the country is the extinction of slavery. No man of common sense, who has observed the progress of events, and who is not prepared to surrender the institution, with the safety and independence of the South, can doubt that the time for action has come—now or never. The Southern States are now in the crisis of their fate; and, if we read aright the signs of the times, nothing is needed for our deliverance, but that the ball of revolution be set in motion. . . . The existence of slavery is at stake. The evils of submission are too terrible for us to risk them, from vague fears of failure, or a jealous distrust of our sister Cotton States. We think, therefore, that the approaching Legislature should provide for the assembling of a Convention of the people of South Carolina to consider secession, as soon as it is ascertained that Messrs. LINCOLN and HAMLIN will have a majority in the Electoral Colleges. . . . and that this Convention shall assemble at the earliest day practicable, consistent with the knowledge of our course by our sister Southern States. To this end we would respectfully suggest Nov. 22d and 23d as the day of election, and December 15th as the time of assembling the Convention of the people of South Carolina.

November 1860

2.

The North Picks a President—Now What?

November 7, 1860

YESTERDAY, the start of the most exciting day in the history of Springfield, Illinois, could not wait for the sun. At 3 a.m., somebody got Election Day started with volleys of cannon fire, and after that there were incessant and spontaneous eruptions of cheering and singing all day long. A moment of delirium erupted in mid-afternoon, when the city’s favorite citizen emerged from his law office and went to vote, taking care to slice his name off the top of the ballot so as to prevent accusations that he had voted for himself.

After the sun went down, he joined other Republican stalwarts in the Capitol building, where they eagerly received the early returns that were trotted over from the telegraph office.

There were no surprises: The long-settled Yankees in Maine and New Hampshire and pioneering Germans of Michigan and Wisconsin delivered the expected victories. And then came news from Illinois: “We have stood fine. Victory has come.” And then from Indiana: “Indiana over twenty thousand for honest Old Abe.”

The throngs in the streets cheered every report, every step toward the Electoral College number, but news from the big Eastern states was coming painfully slowly, and finally the candidate and his closest associates decamped the capitol and invaded the narrow offices of the Illinois and Mississippi Telegraph Company. The advisers paced the floorboards, jumping at every eruption of the rapid clacking of Morse’s machine, while the nominee parked on the couch, seemingly at ease with either outcome awaiting him.

It wasn’t until after 10 that reports of victory in Pennsylvania arrived in the form a telegram from the canny vote-counter Simon Cameron, the political boss of the Keystone State, who tucked within his state’s tallies joyfully positive news about New York: “Hon. Abe Lincoln, Penna seventy thousand for you. New York safe. Glory enough.”

Not until 2 a.m. did official results from New York arrive, and the expected close contest in the make-or-break state never appeared: The one-time rail-splitter won by 50,000 votes. His men cheered and broke out into an impromptu rendition of “Ain’t You Glad You Joined the Republicans?” Outside, pandemonium had been unleashed, but Abraham Lincoln partook of none it, and instead put on his hat and walked home to bed.

“The Republican pulse continues to beat high,” exulted a correspondent for The New York Times. “Chanticleer is perched on the back of the American Eagle, and with flapping wings and a sonorous note proclaims his joy at the victory. The return for the first Napoleon from Elba did not create a greater excitement than the returns for the present election.”

Well should he sing, for the days of song will end soon enough. Mr. Lincoln is indeed the president-elect, but barely by a whisker, and what exactly one means by “the United States” any more is apt to become a topic of some heated discussion. Lincoln won his parlay, taking sixteen of the seventeen Northern states that he set his sights on, including the hard-fought New York, and most by a solid majority.

But there were states where he was more lucky than popular, like California, where all four candidates polled significant numbers. Lincoln won only 32.3 percent of the ballots, but managed to eke out a victory and capture the state’s four electoral votes by the wafer-thin margin of 734 votes. A similar, if slightly less dramatic story played out in Oregon, where Lincoln’s victory margin was fewer than 1,200 votes. In his home state of Illinois, facing Mr. Douglas, Mr. Lincoln won by fewer than 12,000 out of 350,000 votes cast—a clear win but hardly a romp.

The South, of course, presents a vastly different picture. In the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas Mr. Lincoln received a combined total of no votes. None. True, his name wasn’t even listed on the ballot, but that seems to be a mere technical oversight that would have had no great consequence. After all, in Virginia, the largest and wealthiest southern state, Mr. Lincoln was on the ballot, and there he tallied 1,887 votes, or just 1.1 percent of the total cast. The results were even worse in Kentucky, his place of birth. One might have thought that sheer native pride should have earned him more than 1,364 of the 146,216 votes cast, but perhaps Kentuckians resented that he deserted them at such a tender age.

All told, Mr. Lincoln will assume the presidency in March on the strength of his muscular 180 electoral votes, and despite the puny 39.8 percent of the popular vote he accumulated.

The narrowness of this fragile mandate (if that word can even be used) naturally invites speculation about what might have been. The year began with Mr. Douglas standing, like Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan before him, as an electable anti-slavery Northerner who could be depended on to maintain Southern prerogatives. But from the moment last April when fire-eating Southern Democrats made it clear that they would rather punish Mr. Douglas for his vote on the Kansas-Nebraska Act two years ago than win the White House in the fall, it was ordained that the Little Giant, so long touted as a certain president-to-be, was steering a doomed vessel.

Yet there were times when his campaign picked up speed, and at such moments Mr. Douglas seemed very close to capturing enough support to thwart Mr. Lincoln’s Northern sweep and deny him his Electoral College majority. Had that happened, Mr. Douglas would be sitting solidly in second place. He would have demonstrated support in both North and South, and he would offer the South preservation of the status quo. That might well have been enough to pacify the reckless Southern Democrats who shunned him in the spring, and to win their support in the House of Representatives.

But for every Douglas surge there was a Douglas blunder. Final tallies show that wherever Mr. Douglas actually campaigned in New York, he won more votes than President Buchanan took when he captured the state four years ago. But instead of investing his time in the Empire State, Mr. Douglas headed into the inhospitable South, where he did the seemingly impossible—he managed to make Southern voters dislike him even more than they already did. Appearing before a crowd in Virginia, he was asked if the election of Mr. Lincoln would justify secession. A politician of Mr. Douglas’s experience should have known how to handle this kind of question with finesse, but instead he offered the one answer certain to damage him. No, he told the crowd.

He might have stopped at that, but perhaps figuring that, having jumped the fence, he may as well have a picnic, he told the crowd, “It is the duty of the president of the United States to enforce the laws of the United States, and if Mr. Lincoln is the winner, I will do all in my power to help the government do so.” With that answer, Mr. Douglas dismissed the purported right to secede that the South so cherishes and surrendered his claim as the only man who could be counted on to keep the Union together.

Now that task falls to a president who received fewer than four votes in ten; a president who is purely the creature of only one section of the country; a president who, apart from one undistinguished term in the House of Representatives a decade ago, has no experience in public office at the federal level (Lincoln was in the state legislature in Illinois for several terms, however much or little you value that); a president who comes from a Republican Party that has been stitched together from various interests, who will be asked to work with a Congress whose two houses are controlled by Democrats.

The fire-eaters in South Carolina have already announced that they will immediately introduce a bill of secession. But that has been something they have been itching to do for years; as any doctor or fireman will tell you, sometimes the best way to end a fever or a blaze is to just let the thing burn out. Not everyone in the South is a slave owner, and not every slave owner is a disunionist. If any of the firebrands would take the time to listen to what Mr. Lincoln has actually said, they would see that he is no raving abolitionist like Senator William Seward and his ilk. (Indeed, anti-slavery activist Wendell Phillips sneeringly calls Mr. Lincoln a “huckster” and William Lloyd Garrison says he has “not one drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins.”)

Mr. Lincoln has made his position clear: While he is against slavery and calls it evil, he would not do anything—more to the point, he is powerless under the Constitution to do anything—to end slavery where the Constitution already permits it. The line that he has drawn is against an expansion of slavery in the territories, but look at a map: There are no more territories held by the United States in North America that are in dispute. On every other matter relating to slavery he has been silent. And ultimately, they ought to realize that Mr. Lincoln may not be an experienced politician, or have strong political support, but that by training and avocation he is a lawyer, and a good one. And almost every lawyer will tell you that it is cheaper to settle a matter quietly than to fight it out in court.

Verbatim

A Slave Has Chosen the President

From a speech by Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist, delivered in Boston on election night

Ladies and gentlemen: If the telegraph speaks truth, for the first time in our history, the slave has chosen a President for the United States. We have passed the Rubicon, for Mr. Lincoln rules today as much as he will after the 4th of March. It is the moral effect of this victory, not anything which his Administration can or will probably do, that gives value to this success. Not an Abolitionist—hardly an Anti-Slavery man—Mr. Lincoln consents to represent an Anti-Slavery idea. A pawn on the political chessboard, his value is in his position; with fair effort, we may soon change him for Knight, Bishop or Queen, and sweep the board.

This position he owes to no merit of his own, but to lives that have roused the nation’s conscience and deeds that have ploughed deep into the heart. . . . There was great noise at [the Republican convention in] Chicago—much pulling of wires and creasing of wheels—then forth steps Abraham Lincoln. But John Brown was behind the curtain, and the cannon of March 4 will only echo the rifles at Harper’s Ferry. Last year we stood looking sadly at that gibbet against the Virginia sky. One turn of the kaleidoscope—the picture is Lincoln in the balcony of the Capitol, and a million of hearts beating welcome below.

An Entire Misapprehension

From a memorandum by Henry A. Raymond, editor of The New York Times, of a private note received from Abraham Lincoln, president-elect

I agree with you perfectly in thinking that any declaration of intentions from me would be premature, uncalled for, and quite as likely to increase as to allay the existence of excitement of the public mind.

The cause of that excitement is evidently an entire misapprehension on the part of the Southern people, of the sentiments and purposes of the Republican party. That cause can only be removed by actual experience of a Republican Administration. . . . I have too much faith in the good sense and patriotism of the people of the South to apprehend any violent disruption on their part from the mere fear of future aggression, while I have too much faith in their honor to expect them to submit to such aggression when actually committed.

A New Order of Things

Daily Chronicle and Sentinel (Augusta, Georgia), November 1860

It is apparent to all men that in place of brotherhood and equity, there is hatred, intolerance, fanaticism and defiance. . . . [B]y the aggressive and sectional attitude of the North, maintained and exhibited to some extent for years, and now plainly marked by the election of candidates avowedly hostile to the rights, honor, interests, peace, safety and tranquility of one whole section of the Confederacy, it becomes the duty of the minority to consult wisely and well as to what is now their duty. That with the feelings manifested by the election of Lincoln . . . there can be no peace and good-will between the sections, unless a new order of things arises. . . . The North and the South must come fairly and squarely to understand one another, and to learn definitely what each will do. This is a matter which belongs to the people of each Sovereign State, and they will doubtless be called upon speedily to act—each State for itself.

3.

Would the South Really Leave?

November 11, 1860

WITH NEARLY HALF A YEAR to prepare for the possibility of a Lincoln election, the editorial writers of the South had ample time to sharpen their rhetoric, and the arias of wroth and venom unleashed after last Tuesday’s decision proved that those months were not idly spent.

“If we submit now to Lincoln’s election,” said the Fayetteville North Carolinian, “your homes will be visited by one of the most fearful and horrible butcheries that has cursed the face of the globe.” Said the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner, “Here [is] a present, living, mischievous fact. The Government of the Union is in the hands of the avowed enemies of one entire section. It is to be directed in hostility to the property of that section.” Added The Atlanta Confederacy even more emphatically, “Let the consequences be what they may—whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies, or whether the last vestige of human liberty is swept from the face of the American continent, the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.” Concluded a pithier Augusta Constitutionalist, “The South should arm at once.”

Hot words, those, but in South Carolina, there were even hotter deeds: The day after the election, fire-eaters lowered the Stars and Stripes flying above the state capitol and raised the Palmetto flag. Three days later, the legislature voted to convene in December to decide whether to secede.

Southerners, of course, have called this tune before. They threatened to bolt in 1820, floated the divisive theory of nullification in the 1830s, and angrily convened in Nashville in 1850. (The governor of South Carolina, William Gist, even has a brother whose name is States Rights—yes, his actual name is States Rights Gist—who was born during the nullification crisis; Father Gist was evidently a fervent Calhoun man.)

Whatever the time and whatever the provocation, the story has always been the same: threats, indignation and outrage, followed in the end by placations from the North and reconciliations that left the South wealthier and the institution of slavery more entrenched. Most assume that past will be prologue. “The South seceded last year when the Republicans elected William Pennington as Speaker of the House,” jibed pro-Lincoln newspaperman Carl Schurz earlier this year. “The South seceded from Congress, went out, took a drink, and came back. When Old Abe gets elected, they’ll go out, and this time they’ll take two drinks before they come back.”

And yet, this time they might really mean it.

Is it all due to Lincoln? Certainly, but that his mere election would incite secession is not so obvious. Though an opponent of slavery, he is measurably more moderate than Senator William Seward of New York or Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, rivals for the nomination whom the Republicans, for all their abolitionist ardor, plainly did not prefer. Nearly a month has passed since Lincoln spoke in public about the issue of slavery, and all he did was repeat that he was Constitutionally powerless to interfere with the institution of slavery in any state where it existed. “What is it I could say which would quiet alarm?” said Lincoln, his exasperation evident. “Is it that no interference by the government with slaves or slavery within the states is intended? I have said this so often already that a repetition of it is but mockery.”

But to the South, Lincoln is but the tip of the spear. “He rides a wave he cannot control or guide,” observes a perceptive editorialist for The Atlanta Daily Constitutionalist, who predicts that Lincoln’s “very restraint will give new strength to its pent up fury, and it will carry into the same office, four years hence, a man of more revolutionary ideas.”

Republicans are coming to Washington not just with an eye to stopping the expansion of slavery. Their program also includes higher tariffs, which will increase the power of Northern manufacturers; support for the railroads, which will lead to the settlement of the West and to the creation of who knows how many anti-slavery states between the Mississippi and the Pacific; and unrestrained immigration. Eighty percent of new arrivals settle in the North, swelling its power with their labor and their votes. The Constitution may prevent the Republicans from abolishing slavery now, but Southerners are concerned that the great unsettled Dakota prairies will be carved into a dozen states that will become full of Republican-loving Italians, Poles, Irish, and escapees from the revolutions of 1848. See what happens then.

These developments might sit differently if the South felt weak, but in fact, it feels stronger than ever. Cotton production is at an all-time high; perhaps two billion pounds will be produced this year, enough to account for nearly 60 percent of the country’s exports. Almost half the crop will go to Britain, where a fifth of the population of the world’s greatest power works in the textile industry. Two years ago, Senator James Hammond of South Carolina proclaimed, “The slaveholding South is now the controlling power of the world.” With an increasingly abundant cotton crop earning ever-rising prices, no one down South feels obliged to argue, unless it is with the abolitionist who wishes to cast moral aspersions upon him and deny him the labor force that is the underpinning of this ever-increasing wealth.

And so, inevitably, the South thinks of secession—and expansion. The South has long believed that unless slavery keeps expanding, it will die and take the slave-holding elite with it. As Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi recently said, “We of the South are an agricultural people, and we require an extended territory. Slave labor is a wasteful labor, and it therefore requires a still more extended territory than would the same pursuits if they could be prosecuted by the more economical labor of white men.”

Limiting slave territory, Davis says, would “crowd upon our soil an overgrown black population, until there would not be room in the country for whites and blacks to subsist in, and in this way . . . reduce the whites to the degraded position of the African race.” Oddly, Senator Charles Sumner, the ardent abolitionist from Massachusetts, has in a rather different way reached the same conclusion: Limiting slavery will kill slavery.

And so the slaveholders seek to expand, although whether they can go further north and west is more than a political question; there is much doubt whether the climate and crops of western America would sustain slavery. But all doubts vanish when they turn their backs to the north and see rimming the Gulf of Mexico verdant lands that could, and have, enriched slaveholding planters. “To the Southern republic bounded on the north by the Mason and Dixon line and on the south by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, including Cuba and all the other lands on our southern shore,” toasted one Texan at a convention in 1856, and that sentiment burns at the heart of many of the fire-eaters now crying secession.

Don’t forget that not very long ago, such sentiments burned brightly in Washington as well. The Polk and Pierce administrations tried to buy Cuba. Just six years ago, the current president, James Buchanan, who was then Minister to Great Britain, was one of the three authors of the Ostend Manifesto, which maintained that if Spain would not sell us Cuba, we would be justified in seizing it. Accompanying these official efforts were unofficially encouraged forays by slaveholder-supported filibusteros to invade Cuba, foment a rebellion, and grab the island on behalf of expansionist-minded Southerners.

Expansionists north and south initially supported William Walker’s campaigns to seize control of Nicaragua, but it was the Southern expansionists who were his true constituency. The South’s moral and financial support sustained Walker when he seized Nicaragua’s presidency in 1856. And though he governed only briefly, he managed to re-establish the legality of slavery before a coalition of Central American powers defeated his cholera-ravaged army and sent him scampering. Walker made further attempts to conquer Nicaragua, the last of which ended last September in front of a firing squad in Honduras. But Southerners backed every one.

A mere freebooter, Walker nearly succeeded. The ultras dream of what could be accomplished in Nicaragua and Cuba and northern Mexico and the West Indies if a cotton-rich American government should seek its destiny in commanding a tropical empire that would dominate the world’s supply of not only cotton but the staple of sugar as well.

So here, then, is the South’s choice: Does it select a future in which the Southern slavocracy is less powerful, more isolated, consistently subjected to moral castigation by Northerners for an economic system that profits not just planters but innumerable Northern shippers and insurers and mill owners? Or does the South choose to establish a new nation that will sit at the center of a rich and powerful slaveholding empire that will dominate the hemisphere?

There are plenty of people in the South who oppose disunion and wish to move slowly or not at all. But most of the South’s leadership—its money and its political establishment and its opinion-makers—know that the South is at a crossroads, and they mean for it to choose independence.

Verbatim

The Election of Lincoln

Daily Alta California (San Francisco), November 1860

Abraham Lincoln is elected to be President of the United States for the term of four years. He has been chosen deliberately by the American people, after a fair canvass, in a constitutional manner. He has not only been elected by a constitutional vote. . . . The excitement and anger of the campaign are past: we are glad that it is over; we are quiet and content.

No doubt there will be an excitement in the South. Fire-eaters will demand a dissolution. Conventions will be called, speeches will be made, editorial articles will be written. . . . These things will all end in smoke. It is no easy matter to break up the Union: it is an easy matter for furious young men to speak and write furious words; but they will not control great interests and affections. The border slave States have signified . . . that they are opposed to disunion, and without their cooperation, the Gulf States will be powerless; and indeed we do not believe that even the Gulf States would in any probable event desire a dissolution. We are confident that the excitement in the South will soon cool down.

No Higher Authority

New Orleans Daily Crescent (Louisiana), November 13, 1860

We have abated not one jot or tittle of our attachment to the “Constitution, the Union and the Enforcement of the Laws.” . . . But, we cannot say, and we have never said, that we were in favor of a Union to be maintained at the sacrifice of a violated Constitution, by a persistent refusal to obey the mandates of the Supreme Court, and by a general nullification of the laws of Congress, by the majority section, to oppress and outrage the minority. . . . We have never been in favor of such a Union, and never shall be. The fathers of the Republic would have spurned such a confederation with as much loathing as they did the treason of Benedict Arnold. The Declaration of Independence itself says: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government.” . . . Higher authority than the above is not to be found in the history of the United States.

4.

A Superabundance of Velocity

November 14, 1860

The greater number is generally composed of men of sluggish tempers, slow to act and . . . and so disposed to peace that they are unwilling to take early and vigorous measures for their defense, and they are almost always caught unprepared. . . . A smaller number, more expedite, awakened, active, vigorous and courageous, make amends for what they want in weight by their superabundance of velocity.

—Edmund Burke

Among the Southerners who are taking secession seriously, three main groups can be identified. There are those who are talking about talking; those who are talking about walking; and those who want to stop talking and start walking.

The first group includes men like former Congressman Alexander Stephens of Georgia. He wants to express the South’s grievances to the North and give the new Lincoln government a chance to respond. In the second group are men such as Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. He has been talking to his fellow Southern senators about participating in a collective leave-taking some time after the new year. Davis seems to envision an almost ceremonious exodus from the Union, a solemn departure embarked upon more in sorrow than in anger, the better to encourage a reaction itself more sad than belligerent.

South Carolina, however, is the home of the ultras, and they all belong to the third group. Among them are William Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett, fire-eaters who for two decades have shouted secession whenever so much as a rain cloud rolls out of the north. Lately, however, they have been joined by men of a different sort, men of wealth and influence who heretofore have disdained agitation. With their actions, this third group has succeeded in inflaming passions that might well have been safely jawed to death.

The first of this group to act is Robert Gourdin, a wealthy forty-eight-year-old cotton broker who resides with his brother, business partner, and fellow bachelor Harry in one of Charleston’s more magnificent mansions. Gourdin is one of the leaders (chairman of the executive committee, officially) of the 1860 Association, a group of grandees who have taken it upon themselves to promote secession among their fellow gentlemen of the South. On the morning after Lincoln’s election, Gourdin, entirely by coincidence, found himself in the U.S. District Court in Charleston, serving as the foreman of a grand jury. When Judge Andrew Magrath asked him for the grand jury’s presentments, Gourdin, who with his white hair and white beard is reminiscent of Clement Clarke Moore’s St. Nick, refused the request. “Your honor, we cannot proceed,” he said. “The results of yesterday’s balloting has brought to an end federal jurisdiction in South Carolina.”

Of course, it did no such thing. “It is not appropriate for the citizens of a grand jury to shut down a federal court,” Magrath sternly responded. “Such a decision must come from legitimate authorities. The judge paused, then rose to his feet. “Given the probable action of the state, we must prepare to act on its wishes. This Temple of Justice, raised under the Constitution of the United States, shall not be desecrated by a mob. Instead, it will be closed by a duly-authorized federal officer—me.” Whereupon he declared the court closed, removed his robe, folded it over his chair, and announced that he had just administered the law of the United States for the final time.

A dramatic moment, shocking to be sure, but one perhaps better suited to an amateur theatrical than to the great stages of London or New York, let alone the pages of history. Andrew Magrath, after all, is not just a federal judge; he is also the legal advisor to the 1860 Association and was a classmate of Robert Gourdin in South Carolina College’s thinly populated Class of 1831. Still, the Charleston Mercury gave the performance a rave review: “There were few dry eyes among the spectators and auditors as Judge Magrath divested himself of his judicial robe.” Within hours, and with less fanfare, the U.S. District Attorney, the U.S. Marshall, and the U.S. Collector of Customs Duties also resigned. Throngs celebrated in the streets. “The tea has been thrown overboard,” pronounced the Mercury.

Not so fast.

To authorize secession, a state convention must be held, and to do that, the state legislature has to vote to call one to assemble. Rhett and Yancey and their ilk pressed legislators to act quickly; their fellow ultras in Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama might get their timid legislators to also call conventions, but they needed South Carolina to go first. This posed a problem: In every controversy with the federal government since 1830, South Carolina always went first, and always ended up going alone. Learning from their headstrong mistakes, South Carolina’s cautious legislators wanted convincing reassurance that at least one other state would follow their lead. Until then, the bill calling for a state convention would be scheduled for the customary trio of readings. Already one could feel the fervor of rebellion cooling in the torpor of the legislative process.

Re-enter Robert Gourdin. The prominent businessman had been one of the prime proponents of the construction of a railroad line between Charleston and Savannah, and was one of several dozen pillars of Charleston who went to Savannah shortly before election day for the festive grand opening. At the welcoming dinner, Georgians left and right encouraged South Carolina’s secessionist inclinations, although Francis Bartow, the dinner’s keynote speaker, was circumspect. Handsome, Yale-educated, a leading member of the bar, son-in-law of a U.S. senator, captain of the Oglethorpe Light Infantry, Bartow was on record as opposing separate state secessions. Like any good lawyer, however, he left a loophole. “If you think the time has come for disunion, we differ,” he said. “But if you choose to break up the union without consulting us, you have the power of precipitating us into any kind of revolution that you chose.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but Gourdin treated it like a blank check. As it happened, in the aftermath of the resignation of Magrath, et al., Bartow and his fellow Savannahans were arriving on a reciprocal visit to Charleston. Gourdin laid on a spread, treating 77 Georgians and 123 South Carolinians, august and important men every one, to a banquet consisting of turtle soup, turkey, mutton, capon, ham, tongue, lamb chops, duck, shrimp, oysters, turtle steak, pies, pastries, ice cream, figs, coffee, sherry, bourbon, Scotch, wine, Champagne, claret, port, brandy, and Madeira. After dinner, Bartow, full of delicacies and fellowship, went further in his remarks than he did days earlier in Savannah. “I am a Union man,” he said, eloquently enumerating the virtues of the republic. “But I am tired of this endless controversy. But since the storm is to come, be its fury ever so great, I court it now, in my day of vigor and strength. Put it not off until tomorrow, for we shall not be stronger by waiting.” With escalating fervor, other Savannahans rose and echoed Bartow’s sentiments.

“A wild storm seemed suddenly to sweep over the minds of men,” declared the Mercury. “Every man recognized that he stood in the presence of the Genius of Revolution.” Guests stormed the telegraph office to send messages urging the legislature to act, and a deputation from the dinner headed for Columbia with news of the Georgians’ staunch devotion. Swiftly—or at least as swiftly as two houses of a legislature can move—a bill was passed that scheduled a convention on secession for December 17, with delegates to be elected on December 6.

In Charleston and Columbia, caution had been routed. But many men in South Carolina made fortunes keeping to the status quo, and not even every Yankee hater is inclined to gamble a lifetime’s worth of labor just because one Black Republican from Illinois is about to move into the White House. Surely such men could expect to have a voice at the convention.

Even just a few days ago, one might have thought that the voice would have belonged to one of the most prominent men in the state, Senator James Hammond. An ambitious half-Yankee who married into society—wags say that poor plain Catherine FitzSimmons, heiress to 10,000 acres and a hundred slaves, was worth a million for every pimple on her face—Hammond had outgrown a controversial past to attain genuine eminence. Early in his career, he indelibly established his pro-slavery, pro-secessionist bona fides by precipitating the gag rule crisis and loyally supporting Calhoun during the nullification effort. But after years in Congress and a term as governor in the mid-1840s, Hammond’s luminous political career was derailed after rumors began circulating of an unspeakable sexual scandal involving all four teenage daughters of former Governor Wade Hampton.

But three years ago, after a decade wandering in the underbrush of private life, Hammond was elevated to the Senate, where he has been an unpredictable voice. Staunchly pro-Southern in his sympathies, as he showed in his thundering “Cotton Is King” speech, he has turned into a skeptic on secession. Yes, he has maintained privately, the South would be better off in a properly organized Southern republic. But the Union also brings us benefits, and one election of one Republican president will hardly destroy our way of life. Remember, no Yankee has ever been elected twice, and Lincoln’s effectiveness will surely be stymied by our majorities in Congress. We are better off waiting.

A public statement by Hammond could have stalled the secessionist momentum, halting the talk of walking, inviting more talk about talking, disrupting the timetable of conventions in the rest of the South, allowing the cautious to regroup. But before Hammond could make a statement, South Carolina’s other senator, James Chesnut, the wan scion of old money planters, spoke up. In August, while vacationing at President Buchanan’s summer White House at White Sulphur Springs in Virginia, Chesnut scoffed at suggestions that South Carolina blaze its own path. Apparently, as the weather got cooler, he got hotter. “A line of enemies is drawing around us which must be broken,” he told a crowd on election eve. “I would ring the clarion note of defiance in the insolent ears of our foe.” Any ringing he’s going to do will be done as a private citizen. Following the example of Magrath and the others, Chesnut resigned his seat in the Senate.

Within twenty minutes of hearing of this development, a dumbstruck Hammond followed suit, and the rest of the state’s congressional delegation did as well. “I thought Magrath and all those other fellows were great asses for resigning, and I have done it myself,” he has told one friend. “What Chesnut and the others resigned for I don’t know, and I resigned because Chesnut resigned.”

All of these events happened within a single week. In Charleston, in Columbia, in every hamlet of South Carolina, caution had been routed, altering the dynamic of the situation profoundly. The question a week ago throughout the South was whether we should leave. Today, everywhere but South Carolina, it is whether we should join.

Verbatim

Hurry Up

From the diary of Mary Chesnut, the wife of Senator John Chesnut

I remember feeling a nervous dread and horror of this break with so great a power as U.S.A., but I was ready and willing. South Carolina had been so rampant for years. She was the torment of herself and everybody else. Nobody could live in this state unless he were a fire-eater. Come what may, I wanted them to fight and stop talking. South Carolina—Bluffton, Rhetts, etc. had exasperated and heated themselves into a fever that only bloodletting could ever cure. . . .

At Kingville I met my husband. He had resigned his seat in the Senate U.S. and was on his way home. Had burned his ships behind him. No hope now—he was in bitter earnest.

5.

Drama in Milledgeville

November 22, 1860

WITH ARDENT SECESSIONIST ACTIVITY in South Carolina having reached a heated peak last week, a pregnant pause has followed. Until the Secession Convention comes to order in December, the focus of the disunion crisis has shifted elsewhere.

In Georgia, men of probity and wisdom try to decide what to do about secession.

In Washington, men of probity and wisdom try to decide what to do about secession.

And in Springfield, Illinois, a man of probity and wisdom has reached a firm decision. By all accounts, the beard is coming in nicely.

Lodged between the deep South’s slave-rich Atlantic Coast states and the just-developing Mississippi Valley states, wealthy, large Georgia is key to most of the secessionists’ plans. But with two regions that are relatively slave-free—the pine barrens in the southeast and the mountains in the north near Tennessee—Georgia’s appetite for secession is not everywhere so keen.

Knowing that it can’t treat this issue the way South Carolina has, Georgia’s state legislature decided that before it deliberates on the question of secession, it wanted to hear the views of its brightest minds—or at least the brightest minds that don’t happen to belong to state legislators. And so last week, two dozen men traveled to the state capital in Milledgeville to offer their views.

Almost immediately two main schools of thought emerged: the Separatist and the Cooperationist. The Separatists support the idea that Georgia can and should leave the Union on its own, regardless of what any other state does. The Cooperationists have mixed views about secession, but are united in their opposition to unilateral action; whatever Georgia does, they say, Georgia should do in concert with the other Southern states.

Some cooperationists favor secession, while others support secession as a last resort, pending the outcome of negotiations with the North, and still others support secession if and only if the North offers a military response to the South’s demands or to a Southern state’s departure. The Separatists, too, have internal divisions. Most are urging the departing states to combine into a new nation, but some support secession as a mere tactic. They believe the South should rejoin the Union once the North offers concessions on slavery, as they are confident it will.

The presentations took place over five evenings, and the flickering candelabras heightened the feelings of drama in the chamber. From the outset, the Separatists boldly seized the rhetorical heights of the debate and in truth, never relinquished them. Disunion or dishonor—that’s how their first speaker, the legal scholar Thomas R.R. Cobb, starkly defined the legislature’s choice.

Momentarily modulating his emotions, Cobb argued that wisdom, not passion, should guide the legislators’ decisions, but then called upon them to think—wisely, mind you, not passionately—of their families. Remember the parting moment when you left your firesides to come to the capital. Remember the trembling hand of your beloved wife as she whispered her fears from the incendiary and the assassin. Recall the look of indefinable dread from your little daughter. “My friends, I have no fear of servile insurrection. . . . Our slaves are the most happy and contented of workers.” But the “unscrupulous emissaries of Northern Abolitionists” may turn the disgruntled few. “You cannot say whether your home or your family may be the first to greet your returning footsteps in ashes or in death.”

This sanguineous theme connected the comments of other Separatist speakers. Senator Robert Toombs, perhaps the most respected of the hotspurs, noted that the slave population had quintupled from 800,000 in 1790 to 4 million at present, a rate that would result in 11 million slaves by 1900. What would we do with them? he asked. If we can’t expand our borders, we face extermination.

The lawyer Henry Benning also had population growth on his mind. He pointed to the North and to rates of immigration, and argued that free states would soon outnumber slave states and abolitionist forces would dominate Congress. And what will happen then? Soon there will be a constitutional amendment that will require Southerners “to emancipate your slaves, and to hang you if you resist.” This will be followed by a war in which emancipated slaves will “exterminate or expel” all Southern white men. “As for the women, they will call upon the mountains to fall upon them.”

In opposition to these dire visions were a few voices of skeptical calm, most notably that of Alexander Stephens, the forty-eight-year-old former Whig congressman whose corpus consists of a mere ninety-eight pounds of ashen flesh that rheumatoid arthritis, colitis, cervical disc disease, bladder stones, angina, migraines, pruritus, and chronic melancholy disease have not wasted away.

Wrapped in scarves and shawls, the cadaverous, mummified Stephens accepted the thankless task of trying to staunch the hyperbole. Lincoln is no dictator, Stephens argued. Constitutional checks hobble him. Democrats have majorities in both the House and the Senate. Lincoln cannot appoint any federal officers without the consent of the Senate. There are but two Republicans on the Supreme Court. “The president has been constitutionally chosen. If he violates the Constitution, then will come our time to act. Do not let us break the Constitution because he may.”

Of course, Stephens agreed, slaveholders have genuine grievances, and the North has to acknowledge them. Yes, there is a federal fugitive slave law, but too many Northern states have personal liberty laws that prohibit state officials from apprehending runaway slaves. A slave can just walk off the farm in Virginia or Maryland or Kentucky, and no sheriff or constable in Pennsylvania or Ohio will lift a finger to apprehend him. Stephens believed that as a condition for remaining in the Union, Northern states had to repeal those laws.

It was a canny and reasonable argument, the basis of a compromise many Northerners might well accept. But with Separatists conjuring the image of that Black Republican Abraham Lincoln unleashing troops of militant Wide Awakes to invade the South and liberate hordes of slaves who will rampage throughout the cotton belt like Mongol barbarians, poor Stephens might as well have brought a watering can to quench an inferno. As sturdy a rope as Stephens’s proposal may be, it stands little chance of restraining the headstrong Separatists; it may, however, be the line they will try to grasp to save themselves if later they realize they have plunged into disaster.

In Washington, meanwhile, the lame-duck Buchanan administration is responding to the threat of crisis with a combination of weariness and irresolution. Never a particularly dynamic leader—with more insight than he perhaps intended, Buchanan once referred to himself as an “old public functionary”—the president has always preferred to make policy by reaching consensus with a Cabinet he balanced so carefully by region that he seemed like teamster packing a mule.

But the Solons of his Cabinet are failing him. Interior Secretary Jacob Thompson of Mississippi and Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb of Georgia (yes, brother of the wise, dispassionate Thomas cited above) believe secession is a fait accompli and are eyeing opportunities with the new government. Secretary of War John Floyd of Virginia is torn between his Southern sympathies and pro-Union convictions. Michigan’s Lewis Cass, the seventy-eight-year-old secretary of state, is showing signs of mental feebleness; Connecticut’s Isaac Toucey, the secretary of the Navy, has never demonstrated much mental capacity to enfeeble.

Buchanan proposed to respond to secessionists with an ingenious proposal: to call a convention of the states, as permitted under Article V of the Constitution, to discuss an amendment that would permit secession. It was a shrewd idea; the hotspurs in South Carolina have already dispensed with talking, but the serious men of the South would have looked unreasonable if they refused an open-handed invitation to discuss their problems. And yet a national convention might well provide a place where pro-Unionists of every stripe could come together and exhibit their considerable strength.

The Cabinet offered Buchanan scant support. Thompson and Cobb, participating in a government they no longer believed in, inveighed against the idea as too little, too late. Floyd, as per his custom, was noncommittal. The others, unable to plan ahead to coffee until they’ve had their pie, objected to the scheme because it might offer legitimacy to the possibility of secession.

Faced with these nattering advisers, a stronger leader might have sacked the lot and pressed on with his proposal. But Buchanan is spent. Exhausted and fearful, he settled for a watered-down version of a statement against secession written by Attorney General Jeremiah Black. Black had argued in Cabinet meetings in favor of the government’s duty to defend itself against disunionists—“meet,” “repel,” and “subdue” were the words Black used—but the timorous Buchanan scrapped Black’s vigorous language and issued a mild condemnation of secession that declined to so much as wag a disapproving finger at the ultras of the South. In two weeks the president is scheduled to present his annual message to Congress; perhaps that will still be enough time for him to look in the White House attic to see if Andrew Jackson left behind some backbone he could use.

With the outgoing president marking time, many are looking for the incoming chief executive to show some leadership. Apparently they will have to wait until Mr. Lincoln is actually on the federal payroll and starts collecting the $25,000 a year he earns for the job.

Lincoln has made no comment about slavery or disunion since before the election, maintaining that his positions are already crystal clear—he is against expansion, and regardless of his personal opinion, he is Constitutionally incapable of affecting slavery where it already exists. Repeating these positions could only give fodder to those who would twist his views, and he’s powerless to do anything for another three months anyway. As the editor of The Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, put it, “He must keep his feet out of all such wolf traps,” and Lincoln surely agrees.

Still, insiders paid particular attention last week to the address delivered in Springfield by Senator Lyman Trumbull at the Great Republican Jubilee celebrating Lincoln’s election. Despite the fact that Trumbull snatched his senate seat from Lincoln’s grasp five years ago, an act that earned both Trumbull and his wife the eternal enmity of Mary Lincoln, the two men are great friends.

Indeed, they are such great friends that it sometimes seems they speak with one voice. Thus, when Trumbull told the crowd that under Lincoln, all states will be left in complete control of their own affairs, including the protection of property, those in the know believed they were hearing the words of the president-elect. And when Trumbull said that secession is not only impractical, it is a Constitutional impossibility, it was like hearing from Lincoln himself. What good it will do is another matter. The New York Herald cheerfully predicted “the speech will go a great ways in clearing the Southern sky of the clouds of disunion.” But whoever wrote that probably hadn’t heard any of the speeches in Milledgeville this week.

Meanwhile, Lincoln continues to prepare for his presidency. Springfield has proven to be a magnet for eager office-seekers, most of whom depart in disappointment. Perhaps the saddest of those who have departed Springfield is not an office-seeker but an artist, Jesse Atwood of Philadelphia, who painted Lincoln just before the election. The portrait, described as “perfect in feature and delineation,” was generously praised when exhibited in the capitol in Springfield.

Unfortunately for Atwood, Lincoln decided that he would look more presidential with a beard, and after a day or two, Atwood’s portrait was out of date. Atwood left Springfield, raced back, and filled in some whiskers, but he wasn’t working from life and he surmised the wrong style. Now he has a picture that resembles Lincoln neither then nor now. But apart from Atwood, most people like the beard.

Verbatim

The Union Is Over

Florence Gazette (Alabama), November 28, 1860

The election of a President, of any party, is in itself a matter of but temporary importance, and affords, as we have often said, no valid ground for the dissolution of the Government; but the fact once clearly established, that henceforth and forever the north and the south would be arrayed as hostile sections in a contest which could end only by the subjugation of one or the other, and in which the weaker would rapidly become still weaker and the stronger gain strength—this fact once clearly established, as it has been by the last Presidential election, proves that the Union between those two sections has practically ceased to exist, and that its mere forms are but as the chain binding together deadly enemies sharing a common doom.

The Reason for Secession

Washington National Republican, November 28, 1860

Every one knows that the election of a Republican President is not the cause of the great increase of disunion sentiment now so manifest in the cotton States. Every one knows that this has been merely seized upon as a pretext for a secession movement. . . . Now, what is this new motive? . . . The increasing demand for cotton, and the high price of that great staple for some years past, has stimulated its producers to extend its cultivation to the utmost of their ability. The great check upon their enterprise in this direction has been the high and constantly increasing prices of negro laborers. Slave labor being the principal ingredient in the cost of cotton producing, to cheapen the cost of that labor has of course been a great desideratum with those engaged in its cultivation. The proposition to reopen the African slave trade presented the only possible mode of effecting this desired result. . . .

A little reflection, however, satisfied every man of ordinary sense, of the utter hopelessness of attaining this object in the Union. But in a Southern Confederacy, where the reign of “King Cotton” would be supreme, the measure was conceived to be perfectly feasible. The hope of obtaining negro laborers at one-tenth of their present cost, was a powerful argument addressed to men who were directing all their energies to the extension of cotton planting. The visions of wealth which this prospect opened up to their excited imaginations, did more to shake their loyalty to the Union in one single year, than all the appeals of ambitious politicians had previously done in twenty years.

We Must Expand or Perish

A speech by Senator Robert Toombs to the Georgia Legislature, November 1860

In 1790 we had less than eight hundred thousand slaves. Under our mild and humane administration of the system they have increased above four millions. The country has expanded to meet this growing want, and Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, have received this increasing tide of African labor; before the end of this century, at precisely the same rate of increase, the Africans among us in a subordinate condition will amount to eleven millions of persons. What shall be done with them? We must expand or perish. We are constrained by an inexorable necessity to accept expansion or extermination. Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slave trade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years. All just reasoning, all past history, condemn the fallacy. The North understand it better—they have told us for twenty years that their object was to pen up slavery within its present limits—surround it with a border of free States, and like the scorpion surrounded with fire, they will make it sting itself to death.

The President Is No Dictator

A speech by Alexander Stephens to the Georgia Legislature, November 1860

It is said Mr. Lincoln’s policy and principles are against the Constitution, and that, if he carries them out, it will be destructive of our rights. Let us not anticipate a threatened evil. If he violates the Constitution, then will come our time to act. Do not let us break it because, forsooth, he may. If he does, that is the time for us to act. I think it would be injudicious and unwise to do this sooner. I do not anticipate that Mr. Lincoln will do anything, to jeopardize our safety or security, whatever may be his spirit to do it; for he is bound by the constitutional checks which are thrown around him, which at this time render him powerless to do any great mischief. This shows the wisdom of our system. The President of the United States is no Emperor, no Dictator–he is clothed with no absolute power. He can do nothing, unless he is backed by power in Congress. The House of Representatives is largely in a majority against him . . . [and] in the Senate, he will also be powerless. There will be a majority of four against him. . . . Why, then, I say, should we disrupt the ties of this Union, when his hands are tied—when he can do nothing against us?

6.

Off the Record, Behind the Scenes

November 29, 1860

IN THIS WEEK OF THANKSGIVING, it is astonishing to contemplate all that has happened since All Hallows Eve.

The governor of South Carolina, without bothering to wait for the Secession Convention scheduled just three weeks hence, has authorized the raising of a 10,000-man militia for the purposes of repelling a federal invasion.

The legislature of Georgia, without bothering to wait for the Secession Convention it has scheduled for just after the new year, has appropriated a million dollars to arm and train troops.

The legislature of Mississippi will begin drawing up articles of secession next week, and Florida’s legislators will begin their debate.

And in Texas, the pro-Union governor, the redoubtable Sam Houston, is fending off regiments of disunionist partisans with the same zeal, and with about as much hope for success as his Texican friends and neighbors who once confronted Generalissimo Santa Anna at the Alamo in San Antonio de Bexar.

Thus may we all take comfort and solace that, these ominous signs notwithstanding, there will be no war.

That, at least, is the view our president-elect presented at an off-the-record dinner with friends in Chicago, one of whom was a journalist from Cincinnati. Mr. Lincoln, the journalist tells us, considers the secessionist movement a game of bluff dreamed up by politicians, meant solely to frighten the North into concessions, and certain to evaporate as soon as its leaders grasp that his administration will not succumb to their complaints.

And besides, said a chuckling Lincoln, who is currently besieged by office-seekers from every hill and hollow in the land, “They won’t give up their offices. Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road would be lined with dead Virginians.”

Somewhat irritated with Lincoln’s blithe response, our journalist friend cautioned the president-elect that the Southern people were in earnest and meant war. In ninety days, he told Lincoln, the land will be whitened with tents. In the face of that somber image, Lincoln sheathed his famous wit. “Well,” he simply said, “we won’t jump that ditch until we come to it. I must run the machine as I find it.”

Lincoln had come to Chicago to do more than mix metaphors. He was there to meet with his vice president-elect, Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, and discuss the formulation of the Cabinet. Although the two men served together in Congress in 1847, neither has a recollection of meeting the other. Only out of courtesy, then, and a respect for the impressive support given Republicans in New England, is Lincoln seeking the advice of Hamlin, for it is not likely that the man from Maine will play much of a role in running the country. By tradition, the vice president does not attend Cabinet meetings but merely observes his sole Constitutional duty, which is to preside over the Senate. Beyond that, if the past is any indication, he is a valued ornament at many a fine luncheon, and otherwise spends a great deal of time at home.

Lincoln has many factors to consider in constructing his Cabinet; rewarding supporters and maintaining a regional balance are but two criteria. A major challenge is figuring out what to do with Senator Seward, who had been the leading contender for the Republican nomination until Lincoln bested him, and who remains a paramount figure in the Senate.

Tradition would have Lincoln offering Seward, as the next most popular and strongest man in the party, the post of secretary of state, the primus inter pares of Cabinet positions. But it is not entirely clear that Lincoln wants to do that. Perhaps his true opinion can be inferred from the cool silence with which he tolerated Mrs. Lincoln when she exclaimed, “The country will find how we regard that abolition sneak Seward” in front of visitors recently (although this anecdote might better illuminate Lincoln’s relationship with his wife; at other times, when Mrs. Lincoln’s relations criticized Seward, Lincoln rose to his defense).

But if Lincoln is not earnest about offering Seward the post, neither does Seward seem that earnest about accepting it; lately he has been heard to question whether he possesses “a ministerial temperament.” What is abundantly clear, however, is that he wants to be offered the post. The editor and political boss Thurlow Weed, Seward’s alter ego, has been undertaking a sly campaign designed, if not actually to win the State Department for Seward, then to at least restore some of the luster Seward lost when Lincoln defeated him, by making sure Lincoln proffers the post.

Weed, citing the trip to Kentucky that president-elect William Henry Harrison made after the 1840 election to offer the secretary of state post to Henry Clay, grandly invited Lincoln to come to his home in New York, to make it convenient for the president-elect to extend the offer to Seward in person. No thank you, Lincoln replied, surely realizing that he could not allow himself to look like a supplicant. Well then, suggested the flexible Weed, suppose Seward comes to your meeting with Hamlin in Chicago? Again Lincoln recognized that this would confer upon Seward premature prominence by placing him on a par with himself and Hamlin, and once again politely declined.

Reportedly, the relentless Weed then intercepted Hamlin en route to Chicago and asked Hamlin to tell Lincoln that if he would only agree to appoint Seward as secretary of state, Weed could guarantee that Seward would turn him down.

What advantage Lincoln might find in a public snub from one of the most prominent men in his party is a mystery. All this maneuvering casts shadows on the wily Weed’s least fathomable act of the week, namely, the publication of an editorial in his Albany Evening Journal that outlined the compromises Republicans should make to forestall secession.

Weed, long the staunchest of Republicans, astonished his comrades by suggesting not only a strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Act, but also a re-imposing the old Missouri Compromise line that set 36° 30' north latitude as the invisible mark, running to the West Coast, below which slavery was permitted. After publication, Weed’s thunderstruck Republican allies fumed and howled, but he dismissed their protests. None of the remaining lands would sustain slavery, he shrugged. It’s a meaningless concession.

Of course, Thurlow Weed isn’t the only prominent northerner who is offering compromises. Two weeks ago, Henry Raymond in The New York Times suggested that instead of returning escaped slaves, free states should pay slave owners the value of that slave. What makes Weed’s proposal different, however, is that Seward and Weed are as one brain in two bodies, and everyone knows it. The likelihood that Weed would take such a bold stand on a matter of such importance without Seward’s acquiescence, if not his instigation, is nil.

But why would Seward take this initiative? One interpretation is that he has little confidence in the president-elect and feels the need to fashion a deal in advance of the inauguration, lest Lincoln prove unwilling or unable to perform the delicate negotiating this kind of compromise would require.

On the other hand, if Weed is acting at the behest of Seward, Seward may be acting at the behest of Lincoln. Perhaps this is a signal from Lincoln to the South generally, and to those Southerners who still possess pro-Union sentiments in particular, that he is a reasonable person who poses no threat to their well-being. Supporters of this theory point to his hesitancy in appointing Seward as an act designed to afford Seward freedom of movement as he negotiates a deal; he could appear close to Lincoln or removed from him, as the case may require. Perhaps this compromise-in-the-making is why Lincoln can afford to be so casual about the prospects of war; like the expert safecracker who hears the tumblers falling, he is confident the door will open soon.

Certainly there is nothing the White House is doing that would imbue him with such confidence. So far the Buchanan administration seems incapable of taking any forceful action, including securing the protection of its own troops. In late October, even before the election, the commander-in-chief of the Army, Winfield Scott, warned the administration that with secession a realistic possibility, the federal forts and installations on the Atlantic and the Mississippi would be highly vulnerable to a coup de main, and none more so than the installations in Charleston Harbor. Scott, the seventy-four-year-old morbidly obese hero of both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, recommended that the forts be immediately garrisoned above their currently sparse troop assignments.

But Buchanan and Scott have long hated each other—there is a reason Old Fuss and Feathers keeps his headquarters in New York City, about as far from the White House and the Old Public Functionary as duty will tolerate—and Buchanan dismissed the advice of his general as a gesture more likely to inflame secessionist passions than quell them. (Where these soldiers were supposed to come from is another question. There are only about 16,000 men in the Army, the overwhelming majority of whom are stationed around the West. Only fifteen companies—about 500 men—are on duty in the whole of the East.)

This week the president changed his tune after receiving a request for reinforcements from Major Robert Anderson, his newly appointed commander of the three federal installations—Fort Moultrie, Fort Sumter, and Castle Pinckney—in Charleston. Assessing the situation—the general secession fever, the evidently vulnerable condition of the dilapidated Fort Moultrie, the threatening presence of the harbor hoodlums and wharf rats who menace the soldiers as they go about their duties, the mysterious boats full of armed men that prowl the harbor at night—Anderson begged Buchanan for more men. “The storm may break upon us at any moment,” he told the administration. “The garrison is so weak as to invite an attack.”

Buchanan, deep in the midst of formulating his annual message to Congress that he will present next week, ordered the secretary of war, John Floyd, to send more troops. Floyd, the ex-governor of Virginia who is, in turns, pro-Union, pro-slavery, and an appeaser of the secessionists—in all of North America there is no weather vane more inconstant—has ignored the order. For although he wishes to protect the troops, he feels that sending reinforcements would provoke violence, which of course would be illegal, even though secession is South Carolina’s right. Working with other Southerners in the Cabinet, Floyd had back-channel communication with South Carolina’s governor, William Henry Gist, who gave his word of honor that if no more troops were sent, no attacks would made on the federal installations. And somehow Floyd persuaded Buchanan to accept this assurance.

In short, the president of the United States is unwilling to assert himself to protect men and property that, even under the most secession-friendly interpretation of events, are still under his command. Of course, facts in a courtroom are different from facts on the ground.

Just how far gone are things in South Carolina? Further than you can imagine. Here is a letter that has just appeared in The Charleston Mercury under the heading “Resolutions Aux Temps.”

To the Editor:

A party of young ladies, recently, while sipping inspiration from the China leaf, became warmly imbued with the spirit of the times, and after electing officers, etc., drew up the following resolutions:

Resolved, That we, though by Divine authority termed the “weaker vessels,” are nevertheless endowed with resolute wills, and hence have the power to make resolves, and to keep them,

Resolved, That since the election of Lincoln to the Presidency, we consider our allegiance to the North as ended, and will therefore use our influence in favor of an immediate secession,

Resolved, That we honor all men who are for this movement, but are determined to secede ourselves from all who are opposed to it,

Resolved, That at present the best “feather in the cap” of any young man, is the “Palmetto cockade,” and it makes our hearts flutter to see one mounted above a manly brow,

Resolved, That “Yankee Doodle” is now defunct, and we can henceforth play only marches and quicksteps, and sing of the Lone Star, the Soldier’s Return, etc.,

Resolved, That the Military Institution of the State is a great institution, and her Cadets great fellows,

Resolved, That notwithstanding we feel duly grateful to the Yankees for their past services in making our shoes, &c., we are now seized with a decided predilection in favor of French boots, and hope to get a supply as soon as our Southern President becomes inaugurated,

Resolved, That since the weather is getting quite cold, and manufacturing establishments South rather scarce, we will hold on to our Northern “goods and chattels” a while longer, knowing that our silks and worsteds are from Europe, and feeling that to our calicos and cotton stuffs, at least, we have the original, the “God-given” right,

Resolved, That we honor the sons of Carolina in proportion to their patriotism, and are ready to yield up our hearts to the first Garibaldi who shall show himself.

You can give 10,000 guns to 10,000 Gamecocks and still harbor hope for a peaceful resolution, but once the mademoiselles have forsworn the vision of new shoes, Caesar has crossed the Rubicon.

Verbatim

Aliens

From the diary of George Templeton Strong, a New York attorney

December 2. I fear Northerner and Southerner are aliens, not merely in social and political arrangements, but in mental and moral constitution. We differ like Celt and Anglo-Saxon, and there is no sufficient force in “a government of opinion” to keep us together against our will. . . . These Southern heretics would be inexhaustible mines of fun, were the position a little less grave. For example, Governor Gist of South Carolina writing a grand revolutionary message and recommending all sorts of measures for “national” defense and “national” finance and so on, and the enlargement of the State Lunatic Asylum! “National,” indeed! The whole white population of that dirty little spiteful district is considerably less than that of Brooklyn, less than the increase of this city and county of New York since 1855.

What Is Coming

From a speech delivered by Sam Houston, governor of Texas, campaigning against secession in late 1860

Some of you laugh to scorn the idea of bloodshed as the result of secession, but let me tell you what is coming. . . . Your fathers and husbands, your sons and brothers, will be herded at the point of the bayonet. . . . You may, after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, as a bare possibility, win Southern independence . . . but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of state rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction . . . they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche; and what I fear is, they will overwhelm the South.

I declare that civil war is inevitable and is near at hand. When it comes the descendants of the heroes of Lexington and Bunker Hill will be found equal in patriotism, courage and heroic endurance with the descendants of the heroes of Cowpens and Yorktown. For this reason I predict the civil war which is now at hand will be stubborn and of long duration.

December 1860

7.

Buchanan: Too Little, Too Late

December 6, 1860

IN HIS FINAL STATE OF THE UNION MESSAGE sent to Congress this week, President James Buchanan at long last waded into the secession crisis. And in the manner of a cranky grandfather who has found a pleasant afternoon nap spoiled by a household of fractious children, he admonished the squabbling imps to behave. Much in the Solomonic way elders have of blaming everyone, he found one side guilty of rudely instigating the conflict and the other guilty of overreaction.

Stop poking your brother, Buchanan told the North. “The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at length produced its natural effects. . . . [T]he incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North for the last quarter of a century has produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar.” Presumably, he was speaking of the family altar in the plantation house, not the one in the slave quarters.

And you, stop whining, Buchanan told the South, it’s only a poke. “The election of any one of our fellow-citizens to the office of President does not of itself afford just cause for dissolving the Union. This is more especially true if his election has been effected by a mere plurality, and not a majority of the people”—Come on, Lincoln didn’t even get 40 percent of the vote!—“and has resulted from transient and temporary causes which may probably never again occur. After all, he is no more than the chief executive officer of the Government. . . . His province is not to make but to execute the laws. And it is a remarkable fact in our history that, notwithstanding the repeated efforts of the antislavery party, no single act has ever passed Congress . . . impairing in the slightest degree the rights of the South to their property in slaves; and . . . judging from present indications, that no probability exists of the passage of such an act by a majority of both Houses, either in the present or the next Congress.”

In other words, you in the North caused this problem, and you in the South don’t have a problem.

Everyone may have wished that Grandpop would have gone back to bed at this point, but instead he continued, albeit in a decidedly dreamy way. “How easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country! . . . All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way. As sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them. For this the people of the North are no more responsible and have no more fight to interfere than with similar institutions in Russia or in Brazil.”

Buchanan might have done his successor a world of good at this moment by mentioning that Lincoln has said that he has no intention of trying to prevent any state from managing its domestic institutions in its own way, but perhaps the pro-slavery Democrat from Pennsylvania doesn’t really believe the anti-slavery Republican from Illinois is being entirely candid in this claim. Or, if Lincoln is being frank about his intentions, he isn’t being honest about his ability to control the abolitionist fervor of his supporters, who continue their denunciations of slavery. (And nothing irritates the drowsy Buchanan like those denunciations! “For five and twenty years the agitation . . . against slavery has been incessant. In 1835 pictorial handbills and inflammatory appeals were circulated extensively throughout the South of a character to excite the passions of the slaves, and, in the language of General Jackson, ‘to stimulate them to insurrection and produce all the horrors of a servile war.’” Of course, one might wonder how seeing pictorial images of persons in bondage being whipped stimulate a person to insurrection, if witnessing such events in person—or being a victim of them—has not.)

Thankfully, the whole address did not consist of wishful thinking and finger-pointing. Well, you got me up now, Grandpop seemingly concluded, I may as well do some work. Perhaps he realized that although his time in office would last a mere three months more, three months is still ample time to destroy the republic. The president summoned all of his remaining executive authority and addressed the question of secession.

Ignoring the hotheads hell-bent on secession, Buchanan spoke to the moderate, more legalistic gentlemen who like to contend that secession is a legitimate way of ending what had always been a voluntary association. This can’t be so, the president said, for otherwise the Union would be “a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States. In this manner our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics, each one retiring from the Union without responsibility whenever any sudden excitement might impel them to such a course. By this process a Union might be entirely broken into fragments in a few weeks which cost our forefathers many years of toil, privation, and blood to establish.”

Such a notion, the president forthrightly declared, “is wholly inconsistent with the history as well as the character of the Federal Constitution.” To prove his point, Buchanan then went through the venerable document, showing that in article after article, on matters involving commerce, foreign relations, and more, the individual states ceded their authority to the central government for the purposes of forming a more perfect union. “The framers [of the Constitution] never intended to implant in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction, nor were they at its creation guilty of the absurdity of providing for its own dissolution. It was not intended by its framers to be the baseless fabric of a vision, which at the touch of the enchanter would vanish into thin air, but a substantial and mighty fabric, capable of resisting the slow decay of time and of defying the storms of ages. . . . [T]hey did not fear, nor had they any reason to imagine, that the Constitution would ever be so interpreted as to enable any State by her own act, and without the consent of her sister States, to discharge her people from all or any of their federal obligations.” Secession, Buchanan declared, “is neither more nor less than revolution.”

Had Buchanan ended there with a firm and straightforward declaration against secession, he might have provided a figure of strength that his fellow citizens, especially the pro-Unionists of the upper South, could rally around. Alas, moments after decrying the absurdity of a Constitution that provided the means of its own destruction, he embraced the absurdity of a Constitution that lacked the means of its own preservation.

In an exhibition of unadulterated dithering, he acknowledged that the president had sworn a solemn oath to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. “But what if the performance of this duty, in whole or in part, has been rendered impracticable by events over which he could have exercised no control?” Pointing to the resignations of virtually the entire cadre of federal officials in South Carolina, Buchanan said the “whole machinery of the Federal government . . . has been demolished, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to replace it.” In other words, for want of a U.S. attorney in Charleston, the chief executive is impotent.

Then the president completed the circle. Not only am I helpless, so is Congress. “Has the Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw or has actually withdrawn from the Confederacy? . . . After much serious reflection I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power has been delegated to Congress or to any other department of the Federal Government.” He called upon the states to pass a set of Constitutional amendments that would affirm the legal existence of slavery, a solution that he believed would set the entire matter to rest.

The president is enormously pleased with his formulations; so much so that he ordered a copy to be hand-carried to Governor Gist of South Carolina, confident that he had hit upon a combination of words that would palliate the crisis. In fact, he has pleased no one. The South didn’t like being told that secession was wrong, and the North didn’t like being told that saying slavery was wrong.

But the far greater problem is the impression of the president’s overall ineffectiveness. The Philadelphia North American said, “With much soundness of argument we have singular inadequacy of results.” The Cincinnati Enquirer proclaimed, “Seldom have we known so strong an argument come to so lame and impotent a conclusion.” Senator William Seward of New York—still assumed to be Lincoln’s choice to become secretary of state—archly summarized the president’s remarks by saying, “No state has the right to secede unless it wishes to, and it is the president’s duty to enforce the laws, unless somebody opposes him.”

But at least some people saw Buchanan’s bold assertion of his own impotence and reached a firm conclusion. “There will be no war,” said Senator Alfred Iverson of Georgia, taking a cool-eyed measure of the administration’s lack of resolve. “In less than twelve months, a Southern Confederacy will be formed, and it will be the most successful government on earth.”

Verbatim

A Melancholy Exhibition

New Haven Morning Journal and Courier (Connecticut), December 6, 1860

We come to [Buchanan’s] argument against the right of a State to secede. He argues this point well, and we had a right to expect that having established it, and proved that our government was meant to be perpetual, and had delegated to it all the power necessary to maintain its perpetuity, he would proceed to declare that he, as the head of the government, would see that it was maintained. . . . But no, the man turns face upon his own argument, and declares that after all secession is simply rebellion, and then says neither he nor Congress has the right or power to prevent rebellion because no authority is given to “make war upon a State.” This then is the end of his powerful argument against secession—call it by another name, and it becomes another thing. It is a melancholy exhibition of servility and incompetency for Mr. Buchanan to call the enforcement of the laws of Congress and the Constitution of the country as making war against a State. . . . We never have seen the experiment tried in a free country, of restoring power and unity by the submission of six sevenths of the people to one seventh, but we doubt the feasibility of the scheme. This Message of Mr. Buchanan’s removes the last hope of a reliance upon the Chief Executive of the nation. His remaining ninety days of office will be only so much more time given for disunion to augment its forces, and Mr. Lincoln’s position will be all the more embarrassed by the encouragement his impotent predecessor has given to the violators of the laws, and the destroyers of the nation. There is far less hope now of the preservation of the Union than there was a week ago . . . and [we] are more than ever prepared to witness, within the next month, the sloughing off of some half dozen of the disaffected States.

The Canker of Fanaticism

New Orleans Bee (Louisiana), December 10, 1860

The President appears to place confidence in various specifics which he proposes for the cure of the disease in the body politic. The amendments suggested by him are not likely to be adopted, and if under the pressure of the emergency or the pervading sense of self-interest the North could be induced to accede to them, would they not prove but a filmy cover of an ulcerous surface, while the corroding abscess still raged among the vitals of the patient? What is needed is the surgeon’s knife to extirpate the canker of fanaticism from the Northern heart. It is one thing to compel a people by the overwhelming might of law to avoid injuring their neighbors, and quite another to sow within their hearts the seeds of brotherly love and charity by which they will be eternally restrained from trespassing on the rights of others.

Our readers will do us the justice to admit that we have been uniformly attached to the Union. We have clung to it undismayed by . . . unworthy insinuations of a lack of patriotic sympathy. Even now we should heartily rejoice if the Union could be preserved with honor and dignity to our aggrieved and oppressed section. GOD grant that the means of consummating the wish may yet be found; but humanly speaking, we must say that we can see none.

8.

Will the North Bend or Hold?

December 13, 1860

DOWN SOUTH, the secession crisis has developed like a drama that borrows the noblest elements of William Shakespeare’s Henry V and covers it with the chivalry and dash of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.

In the North, however, it has been seen more as a frothy comedy in which the winsome Miss Annabelle catches her handsome young beau talking to a rival and, alternating flashes of hot temper with frigid blasts of disregard, makes it clear that she will nevah! Nevah! NEVAH! speak to him again. We have seen this before, the North reassured itself. Things will settle down. A bargain will be struck. Common sense will prevail. Among some there was even a sense of dismissive disdain. “They will back out,” The Chicago Democrat chided. “They never had any spunk anyway. They best they could do was bully, brag and bluster.” The remarks of Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, the confirmed abolitionist, approached contempt. “Let them howl,” he snorted. “It will do them good.”

Bit by bit, however, the nonchalance has faded. Bad business news has taken its toll. In a period when plentiful crops ought to have equaled prosperity, a fear of secession began chilling the markets in mid-October and has hung on like the grippe. In New York alone, perhaps as many as 800 businesses have closed or are in peril of doing so, causing 15,000 manufacturing jobs to disappear and stores to offer their goods at fire-sale prices.

On Pine Street in Manhattan last week, a gathering of businessmen estimated to be an astonishing 2,000 in number issued an appeal to the South to be patient. Remember, they reminded, you have many friends in the North—the shippers who transport the cotton, the jobbers who sell the cotton, the underwriters who insure the cotton. Please be reassured that whatever threat the South believes the Republicans may pose, it does not enjoy the backing of our entire people.

That assembly at least was peaceful. In Boston, a secession-spooked mob broke up an abolitionist meeting and chased Frederick Douglass off the stage. When word of the fracas reached Philadelphia, Mayor Alexander Henry acted fast and canceled a similar appearance by an abolitionist speaker, then reworked the entire program to stress pro-Union sentiments and to discuss how the North might assuage the South.

Of course, others fear the prospect of secession far less than they fear the prospect of war. Most people thought Horace Greeley was getting ahead of himself last month when he wrote in The New York Tribune that if the Cotton States wanted to depart, the North should let them go in peace. “We hope never to reside in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets,” he said. Many who thought Greeley was leaping to conclusions are no longer quite so sure.

In Washington, gloom and panic have fought to dominate the mood. One reason is the carcass of President Buchanan’s State of the Union address, which landed with a dull thud on the steps of the Capitol. It may be true, as Buchanan says, that the Constitution spells out no processes for resolving this problem, but no one wants to see a president throw up his hands and proclaim himself helpless. (The Buffalo Courier: “The present crisis in National affairs requires great prudence and forbearance on the part of the Executive, but it does not demand the virtual abdication of executive power by the president.”)

But along with Buchanan’s inadequacy, another important factor has been the reconvening of Congress, which has provided Northern legislators with their first chance to re-encounter their Southern counterparts since the hellions ran up the palmetto flag in Charleston. In no time they have concluded that this disunion talk isn’t the same old high-strung caterwauling, but something far more serious and intense.

“The secession feeling has assumed proportions of which I had but a faint conception,” Illinois Congressman Elihu Washburne has been saying. “Our friends are not fully apprised of the imminent peril.” By friends, of course, he means Abraham Lincoln. In a rather short time, people have gone from feeling reasonably confident that the nation’s problems would be handled to concluding that there’s a fire in the kitchen and a wolf in the yard, and the man in charge has locked himself in the parlor and boarded up the door.

Various candidates have emerged to attempt a resolution. Old John Crittenden of Kentucky, the man who took the Senate seat that had been occupied by Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser himself, has been painstakingly trying to cobble together a deal. The Crittenden Compromise proposes several amendments to the Constitution that would essentially enshrine the status quo on slavery for all eternity.

Stephen Douglas, the Illinois senator who for many years thought he would be spending these very days preparing to occupy the White House, returned to the Senate and the relieved blandishments of well-wishers grateful for his arrival. Oh, if only the voters knew on Election Day what they know now, people told him, you would have won in a cakewalk. However true that may be, what became almost immediately obvious is that the scars and hurt feelings left by so many legislative battles have rendered Douglas ill-equipped for the role of savior, and he has ceased his efforts. I fear for the Union, he has been privately telling his friends.

The problem, of course, is not finding the person who can forge a compromise, but figuring out the terms. In the past, there was always a policy that needed to be decided, composed of terms that could be negotiated. But here the decision has already been reached, and it is the decision that is causing controversy. The election of Lincoln is a baby that cannot be halved.

Which is perhaps why on both sides the men who are showing the strongest leadership are those who have little or no interest in compromise. And this week, the most effective of those men was a private citizen from Springfield named Lincoln.

In the House, several prominent Republicans have been offering concessions to head off disunion. Ohio’s John Sherman proposed carving up all the remaining territories and admitting them as states, with the question of slavery to be answered by the people who settle there. The fact that this notion of popular sovereignty had been championed during the campaign by the Democrat Douglas (and rejected by the voters) seems not to have posed an impediment to his idea.

Indiana’s William McKee Dunn has made an even more extravagant offer. He suggested that Congress ignore the issue of whether Southern complaints were legitimate and just adopt any and all remedies that were lawful and Constitutional and that might make the South happy, or at least quiescent.

Sitting in snowy, stormy, freezing Springfield, Lincoln suddenly faced an extraordinary and unexpected dilemma: What to do? Alarmed by these lavish offers and fearful of having to honor the terms of a bad deal cut by a lame-duck Congress, Lincoln feels obliged to make his opinions known, yet is reluctant to speak out before his inauguration. As such, the president-elect has been writing allies both in the House and around the country. “Prevent as far as possible any of our friends from demoralizing themselves and our cause, by entertaining propositions for compromise . . . on slavery extension,” he has been telling them. “There is no possible compromise on it.”

Lincoln has been categorical in his instructions: Reject suggestions to revive the Missouri Compromise; reject the notion of popular sovereignty, which puts slavery on the same moral footing as liberty; reject any compromise that would undo what we accomplished by winning the election. “The tug has to come,” he told one friend. “Better now than later.” The impulse to accept any bargain has receded.

Congressional Republicans were steadied not only by their offstage leader, but by the party’s rank and file, who made their opinions heard. The residents of the North were never happy about acquiescing to the South’s complaints, but accepted the discipline of democracy. But now, having won the election, they are in a decidedly different mood. Addressing the disunionists, Ohio Senator Ben Wade put down this marker: “You intend either to rule or ruin this government. That is what your complaint comes down to, nothing else.”

In the other chamber, New Hampshire Senator John P. Hale saw Wade’s ante and raised him. “I think that the state of things in this country looks to one of two things: it looks to absolute submission, not on the part of Southern States, but on the part of the North, to an abandonment of their position. It looks to a surrender of that popular sentiment which has been uttered through the constituted forms of the ballot-box; or it looks to open war.”

But not every Republican is hardening his rhetoric. New York Republican Senator William Seward has not only been uncharacteristically quiet, but has been moving behind the scenes, discreetly urging his colleagues to hold their tongues as well. Just five weeks ago, this same man, stumping for Lincoln in Fredonia, New York, equated secession with treason. But Seward, who is widely believed (incorrectly) to have been offered the post of secretary of state, is a wily man, as well as a staunch abolitionist. He is so confident that the cause of freedom will prevail in the long run that he will entertain almost any compromise in the interim. Talk of war excites the hearts of some, but cools the heads of others. Seward seems to be positioning himself near the edge of the precipice, ready to offer a compromise at the instant when both sides take a last deep breath just before they plunge.

Verbatim

No Assurance

From an editorial in The Montgomery Daily Post (Alabama), December 1860, on the proposed Crittenden Compromise

Suppose the North should agree to these amendments to the Constitution, what assurance have we that they would observe them any longer than it suited their purposes to do so? The present Constitution is not essentially deficient, but it has been maliciously violated; the laws that have been enacted under it are not materially inefficient, but they have been shamefully disregarded. Now, what assurance have we that additional clauses in the Constitution would not share the same fate at the hands of misguided fanatics, who are governed more by higher law doctrines than by the Constitution and laws of their country? It is no difficult matter to make Constitutions, but to have them observed is quite another matter.

Resistance

From an editorial in The Kentucky Statesman, December 1860, on the proposed Crittenden Compromise

The Crittenden Amendments were submitted by their author, and it is said were urged with great fervor and eloquence. The Southern men agreed to stand by them as a compromise, but the Republicans voted in a body unanimously against every solitary one of these resolutions, seriatim. The ayes and nays were taken and no Republicans crossed the line to vote for a single measure proposed by Mr. Crittenden. The Committee then ordered the Chairman to report the facts to the Senate. Thus have the Republicans once more distinctly and unequivocally announced that they will not yield a solitary plank or splinter of the Chicago platform. They evince a mulish, stubborn, obstinate, sullen mood, callous to consequences and utterly impervious to all the appeals of the country for peace and justice. . . . This is the question we have now to meet. Submission or Resistance is the issue. We have written RESISTANCE on our flag. We trust there will not be a submissionist found in Kentucky.

9.

The Government Disintegrates as the Union Dissolves

December 20, 1860

THE BUCHANAN PRESIDENCY is collapsing, like a once stately mansion falling joist by joist and beam by beam into utter ruin. The only question at the start of this week was which would dissolve first, the government or the Union. As we have seen, the Union has gone first.

To begin the week, the two great mainstays of the president’s Cabinet departed. First Howell Cobb quit the treasury department. Once a staunch Union man who helped tamp down the dissolution fever of 1850, Cobb now sees secession as inevitable; with his departure goes the wan hope that he could have somehow placated the secessionists in Georgia.

Hot on the heels of Cobb, the aged Lewis Cass quit the State Department, but only after leveling a double-barreled blast of indignation that the president hadn’t acted on Cass’s advice that the forts be reinforced. His denunciation left him a hero to the Unionists for a day, but his proclamation was self-serving; three weeks ago he might have helped the president find a path, but instead he merely contributed to the confusion.

Official friends first, personal friends next. Senator John Slidell of Louisiana and Senator William Gwin of California, two men who had during many long years of public service been the closest and most dependable of Buchanan’s allies, visited the president at the White House and chastised him for refusing to publicly declare that no reinforcements would be sent to Charleston. That was too much for poor Buchanan. Tired of taking it in the neck from nominal allies and friends now manning both sides of the controversy, Buchanan barked that he had heard enough and was sorry he had ever taken any advice from any of them—an outburst that caused the two senators to walk out in a huff.

Next to disappear was the president’s power. Two days after Slidell and Gwin departed, even while the agents of conciliation labored on the side of the president to forge a Congressional compromise, seven senators and twenty-three representatives from Southern states preemptively issued a manifesto urging secession and the formation of a Southern Confederacy. “The argument is exhausted,” they maintained. “All hope of relief in the Union through the agency of committees, Congressional legislation, or Constitutional amendments, is extinguished. The Republicans are resolute in the purpose to grant nothing that will or ought to satisfy the South. We are satisfied the honor, safety and independence of the Southern people are to be found in a Southern confederacy.”

Buchanan barely had time to assess this setback before hearing that William Browne, the editor of The Washington Constitution, had come out in favor of secession. The newspaper is widely considered to be the semi-official voice of the administration, although in this case Buchanan had offered Browne no instructions. Rebuffed by the secessionists, Buchanan was then rebuked by the unionists. For God’s sake, they groused, can’t the government take the side of the Union?

Insults rained down on the Old Public Functionary, many of them assailing him for imbecility (Senator Grimes: “Such a perfect imbecile”) or disloyalty (Vice President-elect Hamlin: “I cannot see why the president is not just as guilty as the men in South Carolina.”) The final indignity was authored by one of those very South Carolinians, Francis Pickens, the state’s newly installed governor. Pickens, a portly, bewigged owner of more than 400 slaves and an ardent secessionist (“I would be willing to appeal to the god of battles, if need be, to cover the state with ruin, conflagration and blood, rather than submit,” he said recently), is nominally a friend of the president. He wrote Buchanan a letter, saying, “I am authentically informed that the forts in Charleston harbor are now being thoroughly prepared to turn, with effect, their guns upon the interior and the city.”

Were that true, it would contravene Buchanan’s own promise to maintain the status quo in Charleston. The governor then had the temerity to suggest that Buchanan turn Fort Sumter over to Pickens for safekeeping. Thus in one preemptory note did a governor of two days’ tenure not only suggest that the president of the United States had broken his word, but then advised said president to yield his responsibility to protect federal property to the same governor of two days’ tenure.

But this insult was not the week’s final blow.

South Carolina’s Secession Convention was called to order in Columbia on December 17. For some delegates this was a moment reached after a forty-day sprint, and for others after a trek of three decades, but all had come to proclaim their liberty and to sire a new nation, and the air was filled with promise and glory. “To dare! And again to dare! And without end to dare,” said the president of the convention, the scholar-planter D.F. Jamison, invoking the noble George Jacques Danton’s defiance of the enemies of France.

Inspired by his words, the convention then took as its first order of business the question of whether it might dare move itself to Charleston. An outbreak of smallpox had erupted concurrently with the arrival of the delegates. Rumor had it that abolitionists had contaminated a box of rags with the disease in an effort to decapitate the rebellion, and many delegates thought it would be prudent to hightail the convention to Charleston on the four o’clock train.

No, protested the longtime fire-eater William Porcher Miles, his voice acquiring the tone of a keyless bridegroom confronting a locked bedchamber on his wedding night. “We must not allow mockers to say that we were prepared to face a world in arms, but that we ran away from the smallpox.” The delegates nevertheless voted unanimously to promise they would consider secession just as soon as they got to Charleston, but for now there was the matter of that train.

After being greeted in smallpox-less Charleston with applause, band music, and a fifteen-gun salute, the delegates invested two days in procedures. Shortly after one o’clock on December 20, however, the critical vote was cast, and by unanimous decision, South Carolina declared its independence. On the streets, delirium prevailed. As the bells of St. Michael’s Church pealed, the taverns disgorged their roisterers, who sang and marched and shot rockets into the air.

In the evening, a more solemn celebration was held. At 6:30, the members of the convention marched in ceremonious procession to the venerable Institute Hall, Jamison at their head. He carried the official Secession Ordinance, a twenty-three-by-twenty-eight-inch rectangle of thick linen parchment that had been inscribed with the statement of dissolution and stamped with the great silver Seal of the State of South Carolina. As the procession entered the hall, a crowd of 3,000 shouted and whistled its approval. Reverend John Bachman then blessed the proceedings, and the delegates were summoned forward, alphabetically by election district, to sign the document. It took about two hours for all 169 delegates to affix their names.

Ninety percent of those men are slave owners. Sixty percent of them own at least twenty slaves. Forty percent of them own at least fifty. Sixteen percent of them own a hundred slaves or more.

The final delegate to sign was the former governor, John Lawrence Manning. Like Moses holding the tablets of the Decalogue, Manning lifted the Ordinance above his head. Flanked by two palmetto trees, he was joined in this tableau by Jamison, who proclaimed South Carolina to be an independent commonwealth. The members of the crowd cheered and cheered, and once the proceeding adjourned, pressed forward. Searching for souvenirs of the great moment, they began stripping the palmettos of their razor-sharp fronds, which they then waved about their heads like Napoleon’s mamelukes as they surged from the auditorium and waded into the pandemonium of the streets.

In Washington now, a far more somber mood prevails. The holiday season, normally an occasion for gaiety, has acquired a distinctly gloomy cast. Friends of decades’ standing find themselves on opposite sides. Men and women whose fathers stood with Washington on the battlefields of the Revolution cannot bear to meet one another’s eye. Northerners visit only Northerners, and Southerners stick to their own kind as well; and even at those occasions, the mood is heavy.

There was one party, however, that would not be postponed, that of the wedding of John Bouligny, the popular congressman from Louisiana and one of the very few officials from the deep South who opposed secession, to Mary Parker, daughter of Washington’s wealthiest grocer. The bride’s father had produced a magnificent spectacle, filling his large home with roses and lilies and illuminated fountains. The president came, joined by his niece Harriet Lane, and was the first to kiss the bride.

It was a happy event in a beautiful setting, reminiscent of so many other happy events and beautiful settings the president had enjoyed in his younger days as a diplomat in Russia and Great Britain. But soon the mood was broken by a commotion instigated by the entrance of Lawrence Keitt, the brash, bombastic, recently resigned congressman from South Carolina. Jumping, bellowing, waving a piece of paper over his head, he shouted “Thank God!” again and again. Finally he elaborated: “South Carolina has seceded! Here’s the telegram! I feel like a boy let out of school.”

When eyes at last left the jubilant Keitt, they fell on Buchanan, his face ashen, who slumped in his chair as though he had been struck. “Madam,” he said at last to his hostess, “might I beg you to have my carriage called?” And with that he returned to the White House to resume his time on the rack.

Verbatim

The Duke of Benedict Arnold

From a memoir by Sara Pryor, wife of Congressman Roger Pryor of Virginia, who was living in Washington, D.C., in December 1860

At the house of a prominent South Carolina gentleman, a crowd soon collected. The street was full of carriages, the house brilliantly lighted.

[Navy Lieutenant David] Porter had heard the startling news, and called at this house to tell it. He found the mistress of the mansion descending in cloak and bonnet, and as soon as she saw him she exclaimed, “Oh, you are just the man I want. I am going to the White House to tell the President some good news. . . .”

“I was under the impression,” he said . . . “that you were having a party at your house, it was so brilliantly lighted up. . . .”

“No indeed,” she replied. “But we have received glorious news from the South, and my husband’s friends are calling to congratulate him. South Carolina has seceded, and we will have a glorious monarchy, and you must join us!”

“And be made the Duke of Benedict Arnold?”

“Nonsense!” she exclaimed. “We will make you an admiral!”

“Certainly,” said Lieutenant Porter, “Admiral of the Blue*. For I should feel blue enough to see everything turned upside down, and our boasted liberty whisteled down the wind.”

* The Admiral of the Blue is the third-highest rank in the British Navy.

What Comes Next

From an editorial in the Louisville Courier (Kentucky), December 1860

South Carolina was the first to withdraw, but she is not alone. In thirty days from the date of her ordinance of secession Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia will have passed similar ordinances. She deserves no more censure, no more abuse, no bitterer denunciation, than these States do. Their action and hers will be the same. When she is singled out for attack it is but to divert the public mind from the magnitude of the movement she is engaged in, and thus to deceive our people in regard to the nature of the crisis. And this is neither patriotic nor just to our people.

10.

A Coup de Main in Charleston Harbor

December 27, 1860

ONE WEEK AGO, secessionists were firing rockets on the streets of Charleston and the Unionists seemed lost. Seven short days later, they are honoring a new hero, Major Robert Anderson, with thirty-three-gun salutes and South Carolina’s secessionists look like amateurs. And the year is not yet over.

To understand Anderson’s act, a geography lesson is in order. The city of Charleston sits on the western edge of a great harbor that is rimmed by two long, curving pieces of land. Seen on a map, the harbor seems to resemble a somewhat flattened version of the letter C. Opposite Charleston on the eastern end, at the opening of the C, lies the main ship channel. There are four federal military installations in Charleston on or near the water: an empty barracks called Fort Johnson on the southern shore of the harbor; a squat, heavily-gunned turret called Castle Pinckney that sits on a reef in the harbor about a mile east of Charleston’s wharves; the modern Fort Sumter that sits athwart the main ship channel and has been fitted with fifteen of the 140 heavy guns that it will eventually have; and aged Fort Moultrie, which sits on the northern part on a spit of land that dangles into the harbor like the tail of a dog. Alone among these installations, Fort Moultrie has an effective garrison; the others are empty or nearly so. Still, the approximately eighty officers and men who comprise two companies of the First Artillery Regiment stationed at Moultrie may not seem like much of a force. But the Army’s plan for nearly all occasions is to use a small number of men to hold a place until a more formidable group can arrive. And certainly, if an enemy armada ever threatened Charleston, gunners in Moultrie and Sumter could apply a withering crossfire to its hopes.

But it seems safe to say that when the Army was planning how the forts could defend Charleston, it gave scant thought to the idea that the enemy would come from Charleston. Moultrie is especially vulnerable, and Anderson likely began considering its abandonment from the time he took command on November 19. Residential neighborhoods have sprung up about the fort. Indeed, many wealthy Charlestonians have built their summer homes nearby and look forward to being serenaded by the fort’s band as they take their evening strolls. Along with the houses, great sand dunes have accumulated through the years, some within a pistol shot of the fort. Lately neighborhood cows have taken to wandering up the dunes abutting the walls and crossing onto Moultrie’s parapets. “If attacked in force by anyone not a simpleton,” Anderson has said, “there is scarcely a probability of our being able to hold out.”

The possibility of such an attack seems to have increased by the day. Whenever soldiers from the fort have ventured into the city proper, the natives have greeted them with hostile looks and belligerent expressions. Some of these come from mere street brawlers, but the law in South Carolina requires every white man between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to make himself available for three months’ military service if necessary, and as a result, the state is filled with dozens of self-organized companies of militia. Some of these units are just primitively armed drinking societies, but others are well-trained and well-equipped regiments. Either way, none of their members needs much of an excuse to get his blood up. In these days, of course, secession is far more than an excuse; it is a solid gold cause.

Most unsettling of all is that South Carolina’s political leaders have made it clear that federal control of the forts is unacceptable to them—as everyone knew it would be. Prior to secession, emissaries from Columbia expressly informed officials in Washington that the forts are a provocation; Governor Pickens wrote to President Buchanan and offered to put them under his control; one gentleman even offered to buy them. Now the time for messages is ending and boats full of armed toughs patrol the waters beyond the fort at night. When a guard at Castle Pinckney hailed one vessel before Christmas and asked what it wanted, someone on board shouted, “You will know in a week.” No one assumed he had figgy pudding on his mind.

Though lodged in Fort Moultrie, Anderson has hardly been isolated. Workers and other visitors move in and out of Moultrie with ease, and adding their reports to the letters he receives from friends in town and from newspapers, he knows that militia companies are drilling and assembling scaling ladders, and that commissioners representing the government left for Washington on Christmas Eve, intent on demanding that the forts be forfeited. Almost certainly they would meet with the president on December 26; almost certainly would he decline; almost certainly they would telegraph his decision to Governor Pickens as soon as humanly possible. As early as December 27, Anderson concluded, Fort Moultrie could be under attack, and by forces far more numerous than his own.

Were Anderson under specific orders to defend Moultrie, he would no doubt have done so with all the valor that duty required. But on December 9, Anderson had been visited by Major Don Carlos Buell, who was acting on behalf of Secretary of War Floyd. The inconstant Floyd at one time favored sending reinforcements to Anderson, then reversed himself and argued that it would be less provocative to maintain the status quo. Floyd’s instructions to Buell were made verbally, but Buell was sensible enough to pass them on to Anderson in writing. Anderson was ordered to maintain a federal presence in Charleston but avoid a collision. If attacked, the troops were permitted to defend themselves. And if attacked, or if Anderson perceived a design to proceed to a hostile act, he was permitted move his men to another of the forts.

At some point, most likely on Christmas Eve, Anderson chose Sumter. The two-and-a-half acre, ten-sided fort (its five long sides are so much longer than its short sides that it is often presumed to be a pentagon) was built on a granite man-made island and named after the Revolutionary War general Thomas Sumter, the original gamecock. Work had begun on the fort in 1827, and by 1856, after assorted interruptions, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis felt comfortable bragging that it compared quite favorably to the excellent Russian coastal forts that had given the British Navy fits during the recent Crimea campaign. Of course, it still wasn’t completely finished.

Anderson knew that his challenge would be to cross the harbor safely and undetected. Perhaps with thoughts of following example of the great George Washington, who crossed the Delaware and caught the Hessians napping with his Christmas night attack, Anderson planned his evacuation for December 25. But heavy rains forced a postponement.

Soldiers spent the next day loading schooners with stores and provisions under the watchful eye of suspicious locals, who were told the post’s women and children were being relocated to the Johnson barracks on the south side of the harbor. But as sundown approached, Anderson surprised most of his officers with the sudden news that they would be evacuating Moultrie. “I can only allow you twenty minutes,” he told Captain Abner Doubleday. Shortly after dusk, around six o’clock, the men boarded several large barges and in clear, bright moonlight began the long pull across the harbor. A rear guard at the fort stood on the ramparts with five heavy columbiads, with orders to fire on any vessel that attempted to interfere with the move, but there was no challenge. With their hats removed and insignia hidden, the men looked like construction workers en route to Sumter, and the only patrol boat that was sighted was towing a disabled vessel and passed incuriously a hundred yards away.

The pull across the water lasted approximately twenty minutes; three trips were required to transport all the men. When two waves were completed, a signal cannon at Moultrie was fired twice. The schooners carrying the families and supplies changed course and veered toward Fort Sumter, and the rear guard at Fort Moultrie set fire to the gun carriages and left. By nine o’clock, Anderson’s risky maneuver had been neatly accomplished. The sound of two big guns from Moultrie booming over Charleston Harbor had inspired no investigation. The usual nighttime patrol boat took its customary post outside Moultrie and noticed nothing unusual. It wasn’t until daybreak, when someone spied smoke from burned-up gun carriages wafting over Fort Moultrie, that the brand new government of South Carolina had any inkling that an Army garrison had escaped a vulnerable bandbox and was now ensconced in an impregnable island fortress.

Governor Pickens was outraged by the discovery. He was certain that he possessed a solemn promise from President Buchanan that no steps would be taken to reinforce the forts. Pickens dispatched two military men, Colonel Johnston Pettigrew and Major Ellison Capers, to Sumter to parlay with Anderson. They conveyed the governor’s view that Anderson had broken Buchanan’s promise to maintain the status quo in the harbor. Anderson said that he knew of no such promise and that he moved his men to avoid bloodshed at Moultrie.

“However that may be,” Pettigrew replied, “the governor of the State directs me to say to you, courteously but peremptorily, to return to Fort Moultrie.”

“Make my compliments to the governor,” replied Anderson, “and say to him that I decline to accede to his request. I cannot and will not go back.”

When Pickens’ emissaries left, Anderson made an even more dramatic reply. He assembled his men on Sumter’s parade ground and raised the fort’s huge, thirty-six-by-twenty-foot flag to the top of the flagpole. From every point across the harbor, the defiant banner of the United States was clearly in view.

A humiliated Governor Pickens immediately ordered Pettigrew to capture Castle Pinckney and the other forts. Pettigrew called up three companies of Charleston’s militia. Excitement coursed through town as the men left their workplaces, donned their uniforms, grabbed their muskets, and mustered at the Citadel. By four o’clock they were mounting their rickety scaling ladders against Castle Pinckney’s implacable walls. None of the militia knew what to expect inside, apart from the giant guns; Anderson certainly could have sent men there as well. And he had—a lieutenant named Meade, who waited inside with the only soldier permanently stationed at the fort, a Sergeant Skillen, who lived there with his family. Skillen’s teenage daughter, Katie, was waiting with her father and Meade. “My,” she sneered, “it certainly takes a lot of brave fellows to capture a fort occupied by only two soldiers and a girl.”

Pettigrew entered and began to read Pickens’ orders. Meade waved him off. “I refuse to recognize any authority the governor of South Carolina might claim to have within this fort,” he said, and repaired to his quarters to write a report. Pettigrew hauled down the flag of the United States and replaced it with one that he had brought from the ship, a red flag emblazoned with a single star.

Katie Skillen began crying. “Don’t be afraid,” a member of the militia assured her. “Nobody shall hurt you.”

“I’m not at all afraid,” she shot back. “I’m mad to see our flag go down and that dirty thing take its place.”

Verbatim

Our Rage for News

From the diary of Mary Chesnut, December 1860

We soon returned to Charleston. Our rage for news was unappeasable—and we had enough. One morning Mrs. Gidiere, coming home from market, announced Fort Sumter was seized by the Yankee garrison. Pickens, our governor, sleeping serenely. One of the first things that depressed me was the kind of men put in office at this crisis, invariably some sleeping deadhead long forgotten or passed over. Young and active spirits ignored, places fro worn-out politicians seemed the rule.

Noble, Prompt and Patriotic

From an editorial in The New York Times, December 29, 1860

The forts had been confided to [Anderson’s] care—and he promptly put himself in a position to protect them. The act was noble, prompt and patriotic—and will be borne in remembrance when men who have hearts for the honor of the American flag, shall replace the miserable clique of intriguing conspirators who for the time hold sway in Washington. There are intimations that the President will reprimand, or otherwise punish Major Anderson for his act, and withdraw the troops at the demand of the Commissioners from South Carolina. Even after what we have seen already, we are not prepared to credit this. We will not say that we have no misgivings, for Mr. Buchanan seems to be so thoroughly under the control of the Secessionists, so pliant and flexible in their hands, and so utterly deaf to appeals from any other quarter, that no act of rash insanity is beyond the range of possibility. But if he does this, if he ventures thus openly and flagrantly to betray the honor and integrity of the Government, we trust he will be forthwith impeached by the House of Representatives, and put upon his trial.

You Can Never Subjugate Us

From the farewell address to the Senate of Judah Benjamin of Louisiana, December 31, 1860

And now Senators . . . indulge in no vain delusion that duty or conscience, interest or honor, imposes upon you the necessity of invading our States or shedding the blood of our people. You have not possible justification for it.

What may be the fate of this horrible contest, no man can tell . . . but this much, I will say: the fortunes of war may be adverse to our arms, you may desolate into our peaceful land, and with torch and fire you may set our cities in flame . . . you may, under the protection of your advancing armies, give shelter to the furious fanatics who desire, and profess to desire, nothing more than to add all the horrors of a servile insurrection to the calamities of civil war . . . but you can never subjugate us, you never can convert the free sons of the soil into vassals, paying tribute to your power; and you never, never can degrade them to the level of an inferior and servile race. Never! Never!

January 1861

11.

War in the Cabinet

January 3, 1861

GIVE ME A PLACE TO STAND, said Archimedes, and I shall move the world. Major Robert Anderson chose to stand at Fort Sumter, and he has moved the disunion crisis onto an entirely new footing. A North that had been demoralized and adrift is now inspired. A debate about the regulation of slavery has been superseded by an argument about the preservation of the Union. And a president who had been as forceful as a feather pillow has become surprisingly stubborn.

Anderson’s decisive and defiant move into Sumter has heartened the North, which since its enthusiastic election of Abraham Lincoln in November has seen the secessionists seize the initiative and the Unionists react slowly and unsurely. But the decisiveness of the slender Kentuckian, Anderson, himself once a slaveholder but always a strong Union man, has had a bracing effect. “These are times to develop one’s manhood. We have had none finer since 1776,” the manufacturer Joseph Sargent told Senator Sumner of Massachusetts. “What we want is an hour of Old Hickory,” said the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, James Russell Lowell. “God bless Major Anderson for setting us a good example.”

And although Governor Pickens’s seizures of Fort Moultrie and the other federal installations in Charleston has had a galvanizing impact in the South, his actions have offended many in the North who were sympathetic to the South’s interests but staunchly pro-Union. “We do not believe that even in this City ten respectable men can be found—outside the circle of avowed Secessionists—who do not rejoice and exult in Maj. Anderson’s conduct,” said The New York Times in an editorial.

Word of Anderson’s coup de main reached the ears of the president via a most circuitous route. Immersed in his escape, Anderson had no time to telegraph Washington. But someone in Charleston did send a message to Senator Louis Wigfall. The bombastic Texan then carried the news to William Henry Trescot, a South Carolinian who until very recently had been assistant secretary of state, and who had become an unofficial ambassador between the administration and the government of South Carolina ever since the abrupt resignation of the state’s entire Congressional delegation.

Trescot, who was hosting three commissioners sent by South Carolina to negotiate with Washington a handover of the Charleston forts, was shocked at the news. Secretary of War John Floyd, who also had just come by to visit Trescot, was also shocked. They agreed that Washington could not possibly have authorized Anderson to act. Trescot then left for the Senate to spread the word, while Floyd left for the War Department in hopes of contacting Anderson.

This was the third piece of hard news to hammer Floyd, the former governor of Virginia, in two days. At a cabinet meeting the day before, he was confronted by the president, who questioned him about an order Floyd had issued to a foundry in Pittsburgh to ship 125 cannon to ports in Mississippi and Texas, despite the intense disunionist sentiments prevailing in those states. This order called to mind a similar transaction completed in October, in which Floyd approved the sale of 10,000 surplus muskets to the state of South Carolina. Such transactions between the War Department and the states have long been commonplace, but given the temper of the times, this one was surely ill-advised, and was made to look all the more suspicious by South Carolina’s use of an intermediary to disguise the purchase.

Floyd began to brazen his way through an explanation of the Pittsburgh deal when he was surprised by accusations from Jacob Thompson, the secretary of the interior, a Mississippi man. A total of $870,000 worth of bonds held in trust for various Indian tribes have gone missing, and Thompson accused Floyd of conniving with an Interior Department clerk to give them to a favored War Department contractor in exchange for some official promissory notes issued by Floyd as collateral. This was a singularly suspicious arrangement, and Buchanan, the least confrontational of men, felt obliged to ask for Floyd’s resignation. Floyd raged, blustered, and pleaded that his colleagues in government were convicting him before he could present a defense. But he didn’t resign.

At the Senate, Trescot found Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and Senator Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia, and the three of them went to the White House, where they discovered they were actually more current on events in Charleston than the president. As he broke the news to Buchanan, Davis could not resist a concluding slap: “Mr. President, you are surrounded by blood and dishonor on all sides.”

“My God,” said Buchanan, “are misfortunes never to come singly?” He then tried to reassure the men that the transfer was not conducted on his orders. Very well, Davis and Hunter replied. Just order Anderson to go back to Fort Moultrie and everything will be back in order. Buchanan sidestepped that overture, saying he couldn’t move that quickly, that he needed to hear from Anderson and find out all the facts, that he would have to call a Cabinet meeting. All right, the senators responded, but meet with South Carolina’s commissioners this afternoon and promise that once you have your inquiry, you’ll order Anderson to return. Not an unreasonable proposal, but the harder Davis and Hunter pressed, the more Old Buck slithered. He canceled the meeting with the commissioners and convened the Cabinet.

Six weeks earlier, Buchanan brought his Cabinet an idea to head off the rush to secession by calling a national convention. His conniving, self-interested Cabinet members let him down. Now Buchanan faces a more virulent crisis, but he also has a different Cabinet. The most effective Southerner, Howell Cobb, has gone. The most prominent but least effective spokesman for the Union, Lewis Cass, has also left. The sharp, effective Unionist Jeremiah Black has been promoted from attorney general to secretary of state, and his influence has increased commensurately. His successor at the Justice Department is the brilliant, combative Edwin Stanton, another Union man. And the feckless John Floyd, of whom the president was unaccountably fond, has become the feckless, dishonest, possibly treasonous John Floyd, of whom the president is now considerably less enamored.

At the Cabinet meeting, Floyd scathingly criticized Anderson for exceeding his orders and violating the president’s agreement with South Carolina about maintaining the status quo. “This has made war inevitable!” he cried. Jeremiah Black vehemently disputed Floyd’s assessment. First, any agreement about the disposition of troops ended when South Carolina seceded. Second, Anderson was not exceeding orders.

Prior to the meeting, Black spoke with Major Don Carlos Buell, who had been sent by Floyd to see Anderson on December 11. If Anderson perceived “a tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act,” he was authorized to move his troops to another fort in Charleston, Buell said. Black sent a messenger to retrieve a copy of those orders from the War Department. To the surprise of everyone but Floyd—and to his panicked embarrassment—they bore Floyd’s signature and the words, “This is in conformity to my instructions to Major Buell.”

Cornered once again, Floyd went back on the attack. He denied that Anderson ever had tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act, and was backed by Thompson and Philip Thomas, the new treasury secretary from Maryland. Black and Stanton argued back, and tempers escalated. Floyd then played his trump. “It is evident that the solemn pledges of this government have been violated by Major Anderson,” he said. “One remedy is left, and that is to withdraw the garrison from the harbor of Charleston altogether. I hope the president will allow me to make that order at once.”

This infuriated Black. “There was never a moment in the history of England,” the secretary of state sneered at the secretary of war, “when a minister of the Crown could have proposed to surrender a military post which might be defended, without bringing his head to the block.”

Then Stanton, replying as though not to an argument but to an insult, contributed his disdain. Surrendering Sumter by this government would be a crime equal to that of Benedict Arnold’s, he said, adding, with reference to the British major who conspired with Arnold, that all who participate in it should be hung like Andre.

“Oh, no!” Buchanan cried. “Not so bad as that, my friend! Not so bad as that!”

The Cabinet adjourned for dinner. During the break, the beleaguered Buchanan met with Southern senators who pressed him to order Anderson back to Moultrie, and then with Northern Democrats who urged him to hold on. Then the Cabinet reconvened and continued to argue. An exhausted Buchanan finally decided that he would meet the commissioners from South Carolina the next day, and would defer a decision about the troops until hearing from Anderson himself.

But in the interval, the situation dramatically changed. By the time the commissioners showed up the next day, Buchanan had learned that Governor Pickens had seized Castle Pinckney and Forts Moultrie and Johnson. These aggressive actions complicated matters, as did the fact that there was no longer a Fort Moultrie to which the troops could return. The commissioners nonetheless pushed Buchanan. One of them, Robert Barnwell, three times insisted that Buchanan’s personal honor was involved. “Mr. Barnwell, you are pressing me too importunely,” Buchanan replied. “You don’t give me time to consider. You don’t give me time to say my prayers. I always say my prayers when required to act upon any great state affair.”

When the Cabinet reconvened that evening, the Southerners tried a new tack. The government should withdraw the troops out of magnanimity, Jacob Thompson proposed. Carolina is small; the federal government is powerful. We shall withdraw as proof that we mean no harm.

Presented with this claptrap, Stanton exploded. “Mr. President, the proposal to be generous implies that the government is strong. I think that is a mistake. No government has ever suffered the loss of public confidence and support as this one has.” Pointing to Thompson, whose department suffered the theft of the bonds, and to Floyd, the author of so many dubious actions, Stanton administered the coup de grace. “All I can say is that no administration, much less this one, can afford to lose a million of money and a fort in the same week.” Still, the night ended without resolution.

The next day, December 29, Floyd at last resigned, melodramatically claiming that he couldn’t sit by as the administration plunged the country into civil war. Buchanan drafted a reply to the commissioners that he read to the Cabinet. Black, for one, felt it entirely too mild, but he withheld comment until the next day, at which point he told Buchanan that unless the president was prepared to offer a more vigorous response, Black would resign and Stanton and others would almost certainly follow.

This was the final blow. Buchanan, like a nail that has been relentlessly hammered into a position from which it can no longer be budged, handed Black the letter and told him to make whatever changes he felt necessary. Black found Stanton, and together they rewrote the president’s response. The terms were clear: The government would not negotiate with those who attack federal property. Major Anderson would not be ordered to go anywhere. Fort Sumter would be defended.

In a final revision, Buchanan put his own stamp on the decision. Remove the troops from the harbor, he had been threatened, or face attack. “This I cannot do; this I will not do.”

Of course, Buchanan had no choice. Major Anderson had seen to that. “If I withdraw Anderson from Sumter,” he told a friend, “I can travel home to Wheatland by the light of my own burning effigies.”

The president’s steadfastness has brought him one reward: the problem of how to reinforce Fort Sumter.

Verbatim

No Consent

From a speech by Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, January 3, 1861

South Carolina has done it. She has declared her independence of us, effaced the last vestige of our civil authority, established a foreign government, and is now engaged in opening diplomatic intercourse with the great powers of the world. What next? Unquestionably we have the right to use all the power and force necessary to regain possession of that part of the United States called South Carolina. How shall we regain possession? It may be done by arms, or by a peaceable adjustment of the matters in controversy.

Are we prepared for war? I do not mean the kind of preparation which consists of armies and navies . . . are we prepared in our hearts for war with our own brethren and kindred? I confess I am not. While I think the Union must be perpetual, I will not meditate war, nor tolerate the idea, until every effort at peaceful adjustment shall have been exhausted. In my opinion, war is disunion, certain, inevitable, irrevocable. I am for peace to save the Union.

The proposition to subvert the de facto government of South Carolina, and to reduce the people of that State into subjection to our Federal authority, no longer involves the question of enforcing the laws in a country without our possession; but it does involve the question whether we will make war on a State which has withdrawn her allegiance and expelled our authorities. Now, as a man who loves the Union, and desires to see it maintained forever, I desire to know of my Union loving friends on the other side of the Chamber how they intend to enforce the laws in the seceding states, except by making war, conquering them first, and executing the laws in them afterwards.

A Mere Partnership?

From an editorial in the Times of London, January 9, 1861

Never for many years can the United States be to the world what they have been. Mr. Buchanan’s message has been a greater blow to the American people than all the rants of the Georgian governor or the “ordinances” of the Charleston convention. The President has dissipated the idea that the States are one people. We had thought that the federation was of the nature of a nationality; we find that it is nothing more than a partnership.

12.

Is This War?

January 11, 1861

LIKE THE BOULDER that rolls off a ridge and tumbles, bounces, bangs into rocks, batters timber, flattens saplings, flushes rabbits, scatters birds, and eventually sends a cascade of dirt, debris, and danger onto whoever and whatever waits unsuspecting below, the cascade of consequences resulting from South Carolina’s defiant departure from the Union three short weeks ago has spurred an avalanche of events.

On January 9, stating that its “position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world,” Mississippi became the second state to secede. “We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union.”

Two days later, averring that “all hope of the preservation of the Federal Union, upon terms consistent with the safety and honor of the slave-holding States, has finally dissipated by the recent indications of the strength of the anti-slavery sentiment of the free States,” Florida became the third state to secede.

Hours later, Alabama departed. The sixty-one-to-thirty-nine vote was much closer than in the other states, but the sentiments of E.S. Dargan, the former chief justice of Alabama, prevailed. Alabama must either secede from the Union, he said, or submit to the eventual abolition of slavery. “There are now in the slaveholding States over four millions of slaves; dissolve the relation of master and slave, and what, I ask, would become of that race? To remove them from amongst us is impossible . . . and our slaves turned loose amongst us without restraint, they would either be destroyed by our own hands—the hands to which they look, and look with confidence, for protection—or we ourselves would become demoralized and degraded. The former result would take place, and we ourselves would become the executioners of our own slaves. To this extent would the policy of our Northern enemies drive us.”

Eleven slaveholding states remain in the Union, but their decisions might not mark the limit of disunion. This week, Mayor Fernando Wood of New York City, believing that a sundering of the United States is a fait accompli, or perhaps just aping the fashion of the moment, proposed that New York declare itself a free and open city. “Why should not New York City, instead of supporting by her contributions in revenue two-thirds of the expenses of the United States, become also equally independent? As a free city, with but a nominal duty on imports, her local government could be supported without taxation upon her people.”

Meanwhile, numerous actions have been taken that in less extraordinary times would be momentous enough to dominate all discussion, yet are now just so many clods and clumps in this rockslide. Over these last several days, Alabama state forces occupied the federal arsenal in Mobile and Forts Morgan and Gaines overlooking Mobile Bay; Florida state forces seized the federal arsenal in Apalachicola and the Army post at Fort Marion in St. Augustine; Georgia state forces seized the federal Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River; Louisiana state forces took the United States arsenal and barracks in Baton Rouge; and North Carolina state forces expropriated Fort Johnson and Fort Caswell. In these last three states, the governments ordering these actions have yet to even observe the niceties of a formal secession, but presumably none of these local officials wants to explain how the local Major Anderson stole a march in his particular installation.

But in what is undeniably the most significant action of the week, artillerymen on Morris Island in Charleston Harbor, acting on the orders of Francis Pickens, the governor of the sovereign state of South Carolina, opened fire on an unarmed civilian vessel carrying 200 soldiers of the Army of the United States that was en route to Fort Sumter. This naturally provokes the question: Does this mean war?

And surprisingly, the answer might be: Perhaps not.

As reluctant as President Buchanan had been at the end of last year to either approve or overturn Major Anderson’s occupation of Fort Sumter, he has been at the start of this new one remarkably firm about accepting the implication of his approval. As calmly as if he were deciding to buy a new waistcoat, Buchanan directed that Sumter be reinforced and instructed General Scott to draw up a plan. Though the two men had long nursed an ill-hidden mutual loathing, the president and the general, each having grown old in the service of his country, were able to conduct themselves appropriately. Within a couple of days, Scott had arranged to send a few hundred men and supplies to Sumter aboard the Star of the West, an unarmed civilian steamboat commanded by Captain John McGowan out of Elizabeth, New Jersey. With a shallow, twelve-foot draft, it was deemed more appropriate for the waters around Sumter than the various vessels the Navy had on hand.

Surprise may have been a key facet of Scott’s plan, but in reality, it was never more than a naïve hope. In Charleston, the small number of soldiers under Major Anderson’s command has never been a secret—why, it might be fairly assumed that in some of the more raffish establishments, most all of them would be known by name—and the idea that the federal government might reinforce the fort has been the constant object of both sober preparation and of overwrought fear. Yankees are suspected of lurking behind every flower pot and chamber pot in town, although anyone with an ounce of sense can clearly see that the only way troops could reach Sumter would be via the Atlantic.

With that in mind, Governor Pickens ordered hulks sunk in the main ship channel to narrow the passage, and removed the buoys from the channel the better to confuse anyone piloting an invading vessel. He put patrol boats in the water, and ordered the construction of a battery on Morris Island on the south side of the main ship channel opposite Fort Moultrie. The South Carolina Railroad assigned forty slaves to the task, and the Reverend Prentiss sent twenty of his slaves; according to The Charleston Mercury, 150 able-bodied free men of color also volunteered to construct the fortification. As soon it was finished, it was manned by the energetic cadets of the Citadel and armed with some of the school’s twenty-four-pound cannons.

Logic may have predicted a naval reinforcement; hard information confirmed it. South Carolina knew a mission was under way. Suspected sources of information include disloyal clerks in the War Department, the freshly resigned Interior Secretary Thompson, and Southern sympathizers who read The New York Times report on January 7 that “the Star of the West is, without doubt, already on her way to Charleston with an efficient body of troops for the relief of the gallant Major Anderson.” Armed with this information, Pickens, still smarting over the embarrassment he suffered over Anderson’s decampment, drew a firm line. “There must be all proper exertions made to prevent the reinforcements,” he ordered. “Let the consequences be what they may.”

The Star of the West arrived in Charleston around 1:30 a.m. on January 9, but unable to spot any beacons or buoys, felt obliged to wait for sunrise before proceeding. Almost at the moment of daybreak, a patrol ship, the Clinch, approached the ship and lit the one blue and two red lights that signal the question, “Who are you?” When the Star of the West did not reply, the Clinch fired a rocket signaling an intruder and the eager cadets of the Citadel, watching from the Morris Island battery, pitched a warning shot across Star of the West’s bow. “You will need bigger guns than that, boys!” cried Captain McGowan, a veteran of the Mexican War. The ship then ran up the Stars and Stripes, and began raising and lowering the flag in a call for Fort Sumter’s support. The battery began firing in earnest and managed to land a couple of shots on the Star of the West, though without inflicting major damage. The vessel moved out of range of the guns of Morris Island, but as it did so, it drew closer to Fort Moultrie, which opened fire. Splashed by near misses from those guns, and with other patrol vessels closing, McGowan turned back to sea, his ship lightly damaged but his entire human cargo unharmed.

Possibly the only people in Charleston who were surprised by the appearance of the Star of the West were Major Anderson and the men in Fort Sumter, who had received no warning to expect reinforcements. From his parapet, Anderson could see the vessel’s signal, but he had been conducting exercises with his men and his guns were loaded with the wrong kind of ammunition. By the time he was ready, the Star of the West was leaving the harbor and Charleston’s guns had stopped firing. With specific orders to avoid any action that would initiate a conflict, a frustrated Anderson declined to offer a belated reply, and forced himself to swallow the insult to his flag.

The Mercury was pleased with the brief but glorious action, which, in its opinion, “wiped out a half century of scorn and outrage.” The much-criticized Pickens basked in the approval of his fellow citizens, but his satisfaction was to be short-lived. That afternoon, the state senate got itself riled up over an indignant letter Anderson had sent in lieu of hot lead. Anderson, of course, was vilified in the legislature, but one delegate, a hot-tempered planter named William Izzard Bull, attacked Pickens for offering such a puny response to the vile insult that Anderson’s protest had inflicted on the South Carolina. “I would simply offer a resolution,” he sputtered in indignation, “that the Governor be requested to do . . . his . . . duty.”

His leadership challenged, Pickens summoned the best military engineers at his disposal and asked them to develop a plan for capturing Sumter. Within a day, they told him a frontal assault would fail, that the fort would need to be reduced by a long bombardment. Such an effort would take time and money, and Pickens has neither.

Quietly he sent emissaries to Anderson, asking him to surrender or to face an attack. Anderson decided to play for time. He suggested that he ask Washington for instructions, and Pickens, as eager as Anderson for a delay, agreed. The next day, an unusual delegation—Lieutenant Norman Hall, representing Anderson, and Attorney General Isaac Hayne, representing Pickens—headed north, Hayne to demand Fort Sumter’s surrender and Hall to receive instructions.

When they arrive in Washington this week, they will find a divided city—split in the Capitol, in the executive offices, in the taverns and salons and drawing rooms. At a dinner party on the night of the attack on the Star of the West, an intemperate and highly misinformed Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia gloated over the event, wishing only that those who had ordered the mission had been sunk with her. As it happened, the chief of those very planners, General Scott, was within earshot of the remark. Taking umbrage, the obese, gouty Scott lunged for the chunky, bibulous Toombs, and the two old bears had to be forcibly separated.

It is like that all over. But somehow, a manifestly hostile action has managed to pass without retaliation, and the issue has fallen back into the hands of the diplomats.

Verbatim

Law or No Law

From an editorial in the New Haven Daily Palladium (Connecticut), January 11, 1861

The cotton States have drawn the sword against the Union, the Constitution and the Law. They cut short all consultation; they strike the first blow; they seize the property of the Union, garrison its forts against the officers of law, take possession of its revenue-cutters, rifle its arsenals to arm their forces against its authority, gather armies to seize the Federal capitol its public buildings and its archives, and fire upon the national troops while peacefully obeying orders. This is not secession; it is not dissolution; it is rebellion and aggressive war!

Men of Connecticut! look this thing squarely in the face! All past differences of opinion, all interests or ties of party dwindle into nothingness; all political questions, all proposals of compromise or schemes of settlement are swept aside by armed rebellion making war upon the nation. A new and appal[l]ing issue confronts us—have we a government, or are we to be delivered over to Parisian mob-law and Mexican anarchy? It is no longer how shall we be governed, but shall we have any government at all? It is no longer what laws shall be made, but shall we have any laws?

Darwin Confirmed

From the diary of George Templeton Strong, January 15, 1861

Nothing new from Washington, or from the insurgents of the South, except that the Old Pennsylvania Fossil is rumored to have relapsed into vacillation and imbecility. It seemed a week ago as if he were developing germs of a backbone. Had this old mollusk become vertebrate, the theories by Darwin and the “Vestiges of Creation” would have been confirmed.

13.

Avoiding War, Rejecting Peace

January 18, 1861

TWO SIDES that were on the brink of hostilities a week ago took a step back from the edge. Yet neither seems willing to move toward peace.

President Buchanan received two emissaries from Charleston this week: Lieutenant Hall of Major Anderson’s command, and Isaac Hayne, the attorney general of South Carolina, representing Governor Pickens. Although a temporary truce is in effect in Charleston, both men came speaking the language of war—possible war, impending war, the initiation of hostilities. Lieutenant Hall conveyed Major Anderson’s desire for direction; Anderson would have used his guns to protect the Star of the West, but because he lacked instructions except to avoid provoking a conflict, he withheld fire. Hayne came to present a letter from Governor Pickens demanding that Fort Sumter be handed over to South Carolina, and warning that refusal would mean war.

But when the men spoke, Buchanan heard a clock.

There are now fewer than fifty days remaining in the Buchanan administration, and the president’s principal objective is to depart from office on March 4 with the country at peace; or, if not at peace, at least not actively at war. There is a truce currently in effect and, with skill and luck, it might last until the new man takes over. And so Buchanan’s policy is to play for time.

Hall’s report offered a key piece of information: Anderson had adequate supplies for the immediate future and was not requesting more men or material. Unless and until Anderson did so, Buchanan realized, the status quo could be maintained. After all, he wouldn’t repeat his Star of the West gambit and send reinforcements unbidden, which meant he didn’t have to answer Anderson’s question about a hypothetical event. Instead, soaking his comments with praise for Anderson’s conduct to this point, Buchanan ordered him to remain on the defensive and to continue to avoid actions that might provoke an attack. Washington would launch no further attempts to reinforce Fort Sumter unless Anderson asked for help, in which case, it would respond “with a prompt and vigorous effort.”

In other words, although Buchanan can’t leave office until the first week in March, he can buck all responsibility for handling the crisis over to the widely admired major. If Anderson decides he needs to fire, he can take aim; if he needs to surrender, he can yield; and if he wants reinforcements, he can ask.

Of course, Governor Pickens also had a fair amount to say about how things are going to progress, and Hayne had come to Washington to present the president with an ultimatum: Quit the fort or face the consequences. Had he done so, Buchanan would have been forced into a decision, and an ignominious one it would be: capitulation or war. When Hayne met Buchanan—only as a private gentleman, not an official of a foreign land—the careful Buchanan again played for time. When Hayne told Buchanan that he had brought a letter from Governor Pickens, Buchanan told him to return with it the next day.

That evening, however, Hayne was visited by Senator Clement Clay of Alabama. Speaking on behalf of leaders from other slave-holding states, both ones that have seceded and others that are leaning in that direction, Clay encouraged Hayne to move less hastily. Take your time, he told Hayne. Why rush into war? There is a movement afoot among the seceding states to combine and form a new government. South Carolina will be in a far stronger position if her sister states are with her. Withhold the letter you have brought for Buchanan.

The next day Clay came back, this time bearing a letter signed by ten Southern senators. The letter urged patience. “Fort Sumter was not taken, and is not held, with any hostile or unfriendly purpose toward your state,” they wrote. “We think that, without any compromise of right or breach of duty on either side, an amicable adjustment of the matter may and should be adopted.” Hold on until February, they advised, by which time we expect “a new Confederation and Provisional Government” to be formed. “Our people feel that they have a common destiny with your people.”

Succumbing to this profession of hearty fellow-feeling, Hayne agreed to withhold the letter and promised to refer the proposal to Pickens, “provided you can get assurances . . . that no reinforcements will be sent to Fort Sumter in the interval.” The next day, Clay visited Buchanan and explained that if Buchanan would pledge to send no reinforcements, he could probably persuade Hayne and his fellows in South Carolina to maintain a truce well into February. Why, he indicated, such a truce might well last until the March 4.

Buchanan’s advisers were none too keen on the plan. “If the troops remain in Fort Sumter without any change in their condition,” noted a dubious Secretary of State Black, “and the hostile attitude of South Carolina remains as it is now, the question of Major Anderson’s surrender is one of time only.” The time to reinforce, he stressed, was now.

But that would start war, and that Buchanan was disinclined to do. For his own reasons, certainly—this truce could last for the rest of the term!—but also for the very practical reason that until the war starts it might still be avoided. Once already the adversaries had come close to initiating full hostilities, and yet events intervened. As long as people kept talking, there was always the possibility that one side or the other would relent. After all, did the North really want a fight?

“They could not win such a contest without the sacrifice of fifty thousand lives and one hundred million dollars,” the arch-secessionist Edmund Ruffin wrote this week in the Richmond Index—a sobering thought indeed. Does the South really know what it’s getting into? Within three months, as one young wag just put it, the Unionists and the disunionists in the cotton states will have their hands at each other’s throats, and they will come crawling back to Washington begging for readmission. Will the sensible, peace-loving majority of pro-Unionists throughout the country allow the radicals on both sides to buffalo the country into war? Former President John Tyler has been going around Washington pushing for a Peace Convention where common sense might prevail.

And one cannot entirely give up hope that Congress might intervene. In the House of Representatives, Thomas Corwin of Ohio and Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts continue to craft compromises. This week Corwin introduced a bill aimed at undercutting the ultras and assuaging those Southerners who may be aggrieved but who are not eager to secede. His bill would repeal all personal liberty laws, uphold the Fugitive Slave Act, enact a Constitutional amendment that guarantees slavery in the places where it currently exists, and admit New Mexico as a state where slavery is permitted. This bill would seem to address all of the concerns of the South, or at least all those that actually permit some political remedy.

And like Corwin, the dogged John Crittenden fights on in the Senate. In December, his proposal for a comprehensive settlement died in committee after the president-elect whispered his opposition. But since then, Crittenden has revived the bill and maneuvered it onto the floor for a vote of the full Senate. Last week it fell by a vote of twenty-five to twenty-three, with all twenty-five Republican senators lined up in opposition.

Why are the Republicans so loath to compromise? For two decades, the goal of anti-slavery forces has been to impose a limit on the spread of slavery, and here at last is that limit: Slavery would be allowed below the 36° 30' latitude line in territories currently owned or hereafter acquired. Yes, this provision would have violated the Republican pledge to oppose any expansion of slavery, but in practical terms it would have had negligible effect, since there is no expectation of developing an agriculture based on slave-sustained plantations in the new territories. And yes, the Republicans object to the phrase “hereafter acquired,” which they believe would invite slaveholder agitation to acquire or conquer the West Indies or Cuba. Crittenden dismisses this concern: The North could almost certainly thwart such expansion in Congress, and besides, the South’s desire to acquire Caribbean territory is no greater than the North’s desire to acquire Canada or Alaska. This line would not invite expansion but freeze it, says Crittenden, who is now hoping to go over the heads of the politicians in Washington and somehow present his plan directly before the people in a national plebiscite.

Both Corwin and Crittenden face long odds, which leads to the question: What then? One man who appears to have been thinking about this is Senator Seward, who seems focused on the what is most likely to be the next phase of the crisis: the secession debate in the upper South and border states. The future is a mystery to all, but one thing that is clear is that it will read entirely differently if the country loses a handful of states fringing the Gulf of Mexico, or if every one of the slaveholding states departs.

Speaking before a packed gallery—but in a larger sense, speaking to the Unionists in the middle and upper South—Seward shrewdly sidestepped arguments about slavery and compromises and the legality of secession. “Congress ought to redress any real grievances of the offended States, and then it ought to supply the President with all the means necessary to maintain the Union,” he said in a calm, sensible way. He then turned his eye to the future of a post-secession America. “War is the normal condition of society in Western Europe and in Spanish America,” he argued, but the Union “has thus far proven an almost perfect shield against this.” Without the Union, the land will become chopped into small states and small confederacies that are in constant turmoil, ruled by weak governments susceptible to the domination of dictators and outside powers, where the liberty of the inhabitants is in constant peril, where national treasuries have been bankrupted through battle, where commerce is crippled, and where fear, jealousy, and inequality infect the relations between states. “Dissolution is . . . perpetual civil war. To mitigate it, and obtain occasional rest, what else could [these states] accept but the system of adjusting the balance of power which has obtained in Europe, in which the few strong nations dictate the very terms on which all the others shall be content to live?” Foreign intervention would seem likely. “Our country would relapse into an aggravated form of its colonial experience, and, like Italy, Turkey, India, and China, become the theater of transatlantic intervention and rapacity.”

Gone will be all that we have achieved, and gone will be all that we might yet accomplish. “When once the guardian angel has taken flight, everything is lost. Dissolution would not only arrest, but extinguish the greatness of our country. . . . No petty confederacy that shall follow the United States can prolong, or even renew, the majestic drama of national progress. After Washington, and the inflexible Adams, Henry, and the peerless Hamilton, Jefferson, and the majestic Clay, Webster, and the acute Calhoun, Jackson, the modest Taylor, and Scott, who rises in greatness under the burden of years, and Franklin, and Fulton, and Whitney, and Morse, have all performed their parts, let the curtain fall.”

To be sure, the slaveholders of the South foresee a glorious future, but it includes the Caribbean rather than the Great Lakes.

Verbatim

The Hope Is Peace

From the farewell address of Jefferson Davis of Mississippi to the Senate, January 21, 1861

I am sure I feel no hostility to you, Senators from the North. I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well; and such, I am sure, is the feeling of the people whom I represent towards those whom you represent. I therefore feel that I but express their desire when I say I hope, and they hope, for peaceful relations with you, though we must part. They may be mutually beneficial to us in the future, as they have been in the past, if you so will it. The reverse may bring disaster on every portion of the country; and if you will have it thus, we will invoke the God of our fathers, who delivered them from the power of the lion, to protect us from the ravages of the bear; and thus, putting our trust in God and in our own firm hearts and strong arms, we will vindicate the right as best we may.

In the course of my service here, associated at different times with a great variety of Senators, I see now around me some with whom I have served long; there have been points of collision; but whatever of offense there has been to me, I leave here; I carry with me no hostile remembrance. Whatever offense I have given which has not been redressed, or for which satisfaction has not been demanded, I have, Senators, in this hour of our parting, to offer you my apology for any pain which, in heat of discussion, I have inflicted. I go hence unencumbered of the remembrance of any injury received, and having discharged the duty of making the only reparation in my power for any injury offered.

Mr. President, and Senators, it only remains to me to bid you a final adieu.

No More Compromise

From an editorial in the Akron Summit County Beacon (Ohio), January 24, 1861

There has been, and is yet, a great degree of nervousness among the Republicans, and indeed people of all parties, in the North, lest our Senators and Representatives in Congress should, through fear of a dissolution of the Union . . . again yield to the clamorous demands of slavery, and consent to . . . the compromise measures sought. . . .

The truth is, the people have become heartily tired and sick of compromises, and this interminable talk about them; and, after all the abuses to which they have given countenance—the enormities that have been perpetrated under them, and the utter want of fidelity, that has hitherto attended the observance of their most sacred provisions, the people would experience great relief, if the very word “compromise” could be expunged from the English language. . . .

Freedom, the stronger, has for the sake of harmony, been compromising with slavery, the weaker, ever since the formation of our Government. “The Compromises of the Constitution,”—“The Missouri Compromise of 1820,” and the “Compromise measures of 1850,” are household words and familiar to every ear. . . . We believe, therefore, that we speak the sentiment of every man in Summit County—we know we do our own—when we say that there should be no further compromise of principle, with slavery, whatever may be the result of the present contest.

An Amiable Enemy

From an editorial in the Daily Delta (New Orleans, Louisiana), January 23, 1861

Mr. Seward’s speech is said, by his admirers . . . to be characterized by a tone of peculiar moderation. . . . The arch-leader of Black Republicanism has spoken. Words of lactaqueous moderation fall from his lips. In honied phrases he recommends forbearance and patience. The fanatical and arrogant majority at the North will probably not relish a style which is so antagonistic to their feelings. Many of them may not understand the philosophy which forms the foundation of Mr. Seward’s theories. But that sagacious man is now, as he has always been, in advance of his followers in ideas, while he has seemed to lag behind them in expression. He knows that a show of moderation costs little, and may gain much. The opiate before the dagger gives certainty to the final blow. To lull the victim to sleep averts the danger of his dying struggles, and simplifies the work of dispatching him. Mr. Seward understands those truths. . . . He appears to be a remarkably amiable enemy.

14.

Showdown in Georgia

January 25, 1861

THE BIZARRE SOUND emanating from the throats of secessionists last week was a strange combination of a triumphant shout mixed with a sigh of relief; disunionists in Georgia had successfully steered the state into secession.

There is no mystery why this result was so desired by the partisans of departure. The second-largest and second-oldest of the states in the lower South, Georgia ranks first in population, voters, slaves, and slaveholders, and with its abundant crops, busy Savannah seaport, modern textile factories, and up-to-date railroad, it fully deserves its reputation as the Empire State of the South.

Besides, just look at a map: With so much behind-the-scenes discussion about the seceding states reconfederating into some sort of political entity, a Georgia that remained in the Union would pierce the seceding states like a spike, leaving South Carolina clinging to the Atlantic alone, physically separated from the poorer, less developed Florida-Alabama-Mississippi combine. No wonder Jacob Thompson, the former interior secretary and now dedicated secessionist, has been telling people, “As goes Georgia, so goes the South.”

For these reasons, Georgia’s ultras acted as swiftly as South Carolina’s in beginning the process of disunion. On the day after the presidential election, Governor Joe Brown, the voluble graduate of Yale, announced that “the time for bold and decisive action has arrived,” and summoned the legislature to convene a week hence in Milledgeville to consider secession.

But while Georgia may have the most slaveholders in the South, it has the most non-slaveholders as well, and the state’s attraction to secession has never attained the white-hot pitch that prevails in its short-fused neighbor to the east. Thus, while Governor Brown and Senator Robert Toombs were laboring mightily for secession, staunch Unionists massed in town squares to declare their allegiance. We do not consider the election of Lincoln and Hamlin as sufficient cause for disunion, was the message from a large crowd in Crawfordsville, according to reports. We are not of the opinion that the election of any man . . . is sufficient cause to disrupt the ties which bind us to the Union, was, reportedly, the view of attendees at a mass meeting in Walker County. “We will never forsake the old ‘Star Spangled Banner,’” wrote one newspaper editor in Harris County, and appended the names of 175 local men who pledged to “preserve the honor and rights of the South in the Union.”

Recognizing the strength of the unionists, the ultras tried to persuade the legislature to bypass the people and accept responsibility and pass an ordinance of secession itself. “Come, then, legislators,” implored Thomas Cobb in the Milledgeville debates in November. “Represent the wisdom and intelligence of Georgia; wait not till the grog-shops and cross-roads shall send up a discordant voice from a divided people.” Said Toombs, more pithily, “I am afraid of conventions.” But it was precisely into the hands of its divided people that the legislature passed the decision, calling for a convention to discuss the matter, to be held on January 16.

The election of delegates to that convention was set for January 2, and in the days that preceded that vote, nothing brought partisans of the two camps together as much as the gnawing fear that its side was facing defeat. Dispatched on a strenuous campaign tour in the hilly northern counties, disunionist Howell Cobb, the freshly resigned secretary of the treasury and brother of Thomas, described the pro-Union sentiment as “overwhelming.”

And while his compatriots were confident of carrying the cities, they lagged in the countryside. “Revolutions of public sentiment are sometimes exceedingly rapid in the Towns and along railroad lines where the people are in the habit of reading the daily papers, or thinking quick and where, not infrequently, one leading spirit gives tone and direction to the whole place,” wrote the Rome Weekly Courier in an attempt to make sense of the discrepancy. “But the great mass of people who live in the country . . . come to conclusions more slowly and dispassionately. They think, every man for himself, and do not act to any considerable extent upon the prejudices of each other.”

If intimations of defeat drove the separatists to campaign all the harder, intimations of defeat drove the leaders of the other side into lassitude and despair. This was particularly true of Alexander Stephens, the widely respected former congressman whose dubious view of secession helped slow the secessionist rush in November. Ignoring calls to speak on behalf of anti-secession candidates, the sickly Stephens spent the campaign in near-isolation, lamenting what he saw as certain disaster: “Let those who sowed the wind reap the whirlwind, or control it, if they can.”

The secessionists, meanwhile, closed in a rush. On Christmas Day, Georgia’s papers published a letter from Southern congressmen saying that there was no longer any hope of preserving the Union. The day before the vote, the Milledgeville Federal Union printed a telegram from Senator Toombs saying that the final efforts to forge a compromise in Congress had been in vain.

Election Day for the delegates to the convention did little to clarify which direction Georgia would choose. A soaking, driving rain drenched the state, and while some voters came out and stood in line to cast their ballots, in the countryside and the upper pine barrens and the mountainous uplands conditions kept voters home; one pro-Unionist estimated that it cost his side 10,000 votes.

But another factor complicating an assessment was that it wasn’t in all cases clear that a voter’s intentions matched a delegate’s sentiments. A voter who favored immediate secession could vote for a separatist candidate on the ballot and feel assured that his views would be accurately represented at the convention in mid-January. But those candidates running as cooperationists represented a variety of views, ranging from staunchly pro-Union under all circumstances to reluctantly pro-secession if talks with the North should prove unavailing to happily pro-secession, but only if other Southern states leave as well.

Confusing as the results might seem to some, secessionists crowed about the outcome. “We are safe in estimating the success of the immediate secession ticket at fully three-fourths of the whole vote of Georgia—or say 80,000 for secession, to less than 30,000 for submission,” declared The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer the day after the election, well before the results were all in. Governor Brown promptly affirmed that analysis: “The results indicate beyond a doubt that the people of Georgia have determined, by an overwhelming majority, to secede from the union.”

But as the convention approached, the use of the words “overwhelming majority” did not seem manifestly justified. The limited results that were released showed no clear trend. Clarke County, around Athens, voted for secession by a margin of three to one, and Floyd County, around Rome, went for secession by roughly a sixty-forty split. But Murray County in the northern part of the state gave the cooperationist candidate 75 percent of its vote. White County went for the cooperationists by 320 to 48. Dade County backed the cooperationists by 346 to 42. A number of districts showed a turnout higher than the vote in November’s presidential election, which seems unusual given that presidential elections almost invariably attract the highest turnout and November’s was not conducted amid a torrential downpour. Calls to publish the county-by-county tallies were raised across the state, but ignored by the governor.

When the convention came to order on January 16, the delegates constituted—to be sure, this is the opinion of one of the delegates—“the most distinguished body of men which had ever assembled in Georgia. . . . Of the 297 delegates, there were not four whose names were not of pure English, Scotch or Irish origin. It would not have been possible to assemble in one hall, by any method of selection, a more truly representative body of the best intelligence in Georgia.”

Two days were spent on matters of organization, and then the body got down to business; a separatist resolution favoring secession was proposed. Before action could be taken on that proposal, however, a competing resolution was proposed by the cooperationists that proclaimed Georgia’s attachment to the Union and called for Georgia to host a convention of the Southern states where they would discuss their relations with the federal government and devise a plan of action that would safeguard the rights of the slaveholding states.

Once again, Alexander Stephens rose to defend the Union. “This step, once taken can never be recalled; and all the baleful and withering consequences that must follow will rest on the Convention for all coming time. When we and our posterity shall see our lovely South desolated by the demon of war which this act of yours will inevitably invite and call forth; when our green fields of waving harvests shall be trodden down by the murderous soldiery and fiery car of war sweeping over our land; our temples of justice laid in ashes; all the horrors and desolation of war upon us—who but this Convention will be held responsible for it?”

Stephens’s sobering eloquence was admired, but not enough to win a majority in favor of the cooperationist alternative, which lost, 166 to 130. The following day, the separatist proposal passed, 208 to 89, and the convention president, George Crawford, immediately declared Georgia to be an independent nation. As the poet Sidney Lanier put it, “Tears of joy fell from many eyes, and words of congratulation were uttered by every tongue. The artillery from the capitol square thundered forth the glad tidings, and the bells of the city pealed forth the joyous welcome to the new-born Republic.”

At the convention the following day, a second effort by a cooperationist delegate to obtain from Governor Brown the official vote tallies of the January 2 election was officially defeated.

The tallies have yet to be released. Meanwhile, in Habersham County, one voter is loudly complaining that his delegate to the convention, a preacher named Singleton Sisk, fraudulently declared himself a Union man to win election, and then voted with the secessionists. Reports of similar complaints have emerged in a score of other locations.

It is not likely that these objections will be long pursued. At the convention, the secession bloc pushed through a resolution mandating that all delegates, most specifically those who opposed the Ordinance of Secession, affix their signatures to the document as a “pledge of the unanimous determination of this Convention to sustain and defend the State, in this her chosen remedy.” As one of its very first actions, the Independent Republic of Georgia passed a law against treason, an act that includes attesting a continued allegiance to the United States. Disobedience is punishable by death.

“Give me the sword,” said Robert Toombs, Georgia’s ultra ne plus ultra, back in November, “for if you do not give it to me, as God lives, I will take it.” An indispensable prize; a close vote; hidden results; claims of fraud—perhaps Toombs and his cohorts did just that.

Verbatim

Treason or Law?

From an editorial in the Boston Daily Atlas and Bee (Massachusetts), February 1, 1861

The people decided, three months ago, that slavery should be excluded from the Territories. The proposition is now to override the people forever in this matter. We are told that anything is better than disunion; but we deny the alternative. We assert that the government has power to preserve itself; we want that power tried. And, at any rate, we are not disposed to give up anything that is our right without an equivalent—value received. . . .

The issue is not disunion or concession, it is the triumph of treason or the triumph of law. Do not despair of the Republic. If the strong arm raised the sword against its sacred life, let the . . . assassin be punished by the attacked. In our opinion if we desire the flag which braved the cannon of Algiers in the cause of freedom to the slave, which flaunted proudly on the battle breeze above St. George’s cross for the rights of oppressed seamen, which waved over the National Palace in Mexico, proclaiming order in that turbulent city, to flutter as the emblem of a mighty nation on land and sea, we shall proclaim as our policy, the Union first, submission to traitors NEVER.

A Cause for War

From an editorial in the Portland Daily Advertiser (Maine), January 29, 1861

If the State of Mississippi perseveres in her present policy, the NorthWest, in the full consciousness of right, will precipitate a conflict between the sections, and we regard the proceedings of that State as far more likely to cause bloodshed, than the precipitate and uncertain movements of the mob of Charleston, or the mob of Pensacola. The proposition that a single State has a right to control the navigation of the Mississippi is simply absurd, and; if boats are actually stopped on their way to the Balize, the country will rise in arms to open the navigation of the river. We sincerely hope that the State will pause, and moved by considerations of simple right and justice, will suspend all action which will have a tendency to precipitate a conflict; of one thing she may be certain, the country will never submit to the closing of the Mississippi.

February 1861

15.

Two Out, One In

February 2, 1861

LOUISIANA, with its French and Spanish heritage so different from the English, Scots, and Irish backgrounds that predominate in the other Southern states; and with a racial status system governing persons of color both free and enslaved that is far more subtle and complex than that which prevails in the other Southern states; and with resources that set its economy apart from the other Southern states; nonetheless embraced the interests of its planters and this week became the sixth state to secede from the Union.

One would not necessarily have predicted this outcome three months ago, when the Louisiana vote in the presidential election went overwhelmingly for pro-Union candidates. However, once the fever erupted in South Carolina, it spread with shocking rapidity. And after Thanksgiving Day, when the eminent Reverend Dr. Benjamin Morgan Palmer, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, took up the question of secession in a much-reprinted sermon, the issue was never in doubt.

“The particular trust assigned to a people becomes the pledge of the divine protection; and their fidelity to it determines the fate by which it is finally overtaken,” he said. “If then the South is such a people, what, at this juncture, is their providential trust? I answer, that it is to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing.” Preserving slavery, said Palmer, “touches the four cardinal points of duty to ourselves, to our slaves, to the world, and to Almighty God. . . . This trust we will discharge in the face of the worst possible peril. . . . If modern crusaders stand in serried ranks upon some plain of Esdraelon, there shall we be in defense of our trust. Not till the last man has fallen behind the last rampart, shall it drop from our hands.”

Nothing at last week’s convention rivaled the majestic heights of the Reverend Dr. Palmer’s Alpine oratory. Indeed, the secession ordinance itself, which in other states has proven to be a whereas-studded declaration listing all the lacerating insults ever swallowed and all the unpardonable injustices ever borne, was in Louisiana a brief statement, comparatively as eloquent as a contract between some chicken farmers governing the delivery of some Rhode Island reds. However, after the 113 to 17 vote for secession, each delegate was presented with his very own gold pen for the purpose of affixing his signature upon the sacred document, and presumably for defending himself when he comes face to face with a crusader on some plain of Esdraelon, should such a need arise.

The event did not, however, pass without inspiring some rhetorical flair. With Louisiana, like the other seceding states, snatching every federal outpost, weapon, and snuff box that can possibly be seized, John Dix, President Buchanan’s newest treasury secretary—one is tempted to say that Dix is also his last, but with three men having held that job within the last six weeks, one does not wish to underestimate the president—ordered William Hemphill Jones, the chief clerk in the first comptroller’s office, to journey to Louisiana and prevent the department’s two revenue-cutters from falling victim to appropriation. Upon his arrival in New Orleans, Jones learned that he was too late: One of the vessels had already been surrendered by its captain, a Georgian, and the commander of the other cutter was refusing to obey the department’s orders. Jones contacted Dix for instructions.

Dix responded via telegraph: “Tell Lieut. Caldwell to arrest Capt. Breshwood, assume command of the cutter and obey the order I gave through you. If Capt. Breshwood after arrest undertakes to interfere with the command of the cutter, tell Lieut. Caldwell to consider him as a mutineer and treat him accordingly. If anyone attempts to haul down the American Flag, shoot him on the spot.” As it turned out, Jones never received Dix’s steely message, secessionist telegraph agents having squelched it. It did, however, find its way into the newspapers, and the North had a new hero. Two fewer revenue-cutters, however.

Five days after the departure of Louisiana, Texas culminated what had been a contentious trip to disunion and became the seventh state to secede. As in other states, hotspurs drove the movement to secession, but in Texas their progress was contested at every turn by the governor, Sam Houston. The venerable hero of San Jacinto is an unyielding unionist, and throughout November and December slowed secessionist forces by refusing to call the legislature into special session to consider secession. In early January, however, disunionists effectively usurped the process and held a rogue election for delegates to a special convention to consider secession.

The election was a debacle; almost half of the 122 counties sent no delegates, and in many well-populated counties, as many as three quarters of the electorate stayed home. Houston tried to undermine the convention by quickly calling the legislature into session, but the legislature overruled the state’s founding father and validated the results, sending the delegates to Austin.

With the vote approaching, Houston, undeterred, continued to campaign against disunion. “To secede from the Union and set up another government would cause war,” he warned. “If you go to war with the United States, you will never conquer her, as she has the money and the men. If she does not whip you by guns, powder, and steel, she will starve you to death. It will take the flower of the country—the young men.” Still, the convention voted for secession, 166 to 8, pending ratification by the voters in a general referendum in February.

(Assuming they approve, Texas will be the place that was settled by American citizens who left their states to become Mexican citizens, and who then rebelled against Mexico and won their independence, formed a republic, abandoned the republic to enter the Union, seceded from the Union, but who may reenter some federation involving some or all of the other seceded states. That would seem to settle things for this politically peripatetic people. But if a sinkhole opens up outside Austin, don’t be surprised to see the legislature open talks with Hades about joining the underworld.)

In less than three months, seven states have quit the Union. The ultras who set this process in motion are no doubt pleased by their sudden success. And yet, with the departure of Texas, the last of the states affected by secession fever has gone. The eight other slaveholding states that may once have seemed naturally inclined to align themselves with the deep South are looking upon the venture with caution, if not outright disapproval. Delaware, Virginia, and Tennessee have all professed loyalist sentiments, and Governor Hicks of Maryland has adamantly refused to call a convention to consider secession. The low-hanging fruit has fallen, and no can predict with any assurance what will happen even next week.

But even as these slaveholding states take their leave, the Union grows. This week the territory of Kansas—Bleeding Kansas, the home of such misery and strife, of border ruffians and bushwhackers and jayhawkers, of the battle of Osawatomie and the massacre of John Brown at Pottawatomie—was admitted as a state, with a constitution explicitly outlawing slavery. A thirty-fourth star will be added to the flag. No provision has been made for any to be removed.

Verbatim

Going It Alone

From the diary of George Templeton Strong, January 31, 1861

One’s opinion changes fast in revolutionary times. Three months ago, I thought with horror and incredulity of the chance that poor little South Carolina might be mad enough to “secede” alone. Now I am content to let her go, and carry all the Gulf States with her to chaos and the devil, if Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri will but be true to themselves and to the Union, or rather (it’s the better word) to the nation. Let the barbarians of Mississippi and Alabama rebel if they like, and call it “secession.” We can get on without them. The national councils are well rid of their representatives. . . . We need not attempt to reconquer and retain the territories of the new Southern Confederacy. It cannot sustain itself long. It must soon decompose into anarchy. The United States will gradually establish itself in possession again by a protectorate, and what were once the Gulf States will be the Gulf Territories. It is all plain sailing if we can but keep the Border States in line.

The Road to Ruin

From an editorial in the Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette (Pennsylvania), January 30, 1861

As to the final issue of the extraordinary disturbance now convulsing the country, no thoughtful man can entertain a doubt. The disunionists are breaking their own strength faster by far than any external force could control them. Their policy is everywhere self-ruinous, and by no possible combination of action can they erect a new confederacy which will endure five years. They may so break up the existing order of things that a year or two will be required to satisfy the misled people of the seceding States that they cannot erect an independent government, but every day of this period will be one of painful constraint, of heavy losses and of extreme domestic trouble to their citizens. The question simply is, how long shall both themselves and ourselves remain in this suspense, a suspense which costs us serious losses, no doubt, but which costs them ten times as much in every way. The end is certain, but the road to it may be longer or shorter, and may be comparatively easy or extremely severe and disastrous. If all the cotton States follow in the track of South Carolina, they will come out of the trial almost hopelessly crushed, their external commerce almost annihilated, and their material resources of every sort cut down one half at least. . . . New Orleans has already lost largely in cotton shipment as compared with last year, and if it is the desire of her merchants to sink as low as Charleston has sunk in cotton shipment, secession is the sure road downward. Let them shout for disunion and run up the pelican flag. The pelican sometimes gorges itself on reptiles, and possibly the Charleston rattlesnake may furnish a meal for it in the end.

16.

Cold Hopes, Warm Dreams, Chilly Schemes

February 9, 1861

ONE COULD NOT HELP FEELING if not awestruck then at least properly respectful at the gathering of political nobility assembled last week at Willard’s Hotel: six former Cabinet members, nineteen ex-governors, fourteen former senators, fifty former representatives, and a dozen state supreme court judges. It was dramatic to see so many giants of the past—John Wright, who sat in Congress in the 1820s and is now nearly blind, and Thomas Ewing, who was in the cabinet of Zachary Taylor, and David Wilmot, the architect of the Wilmot Proviso, and James Clay, son of the Great Compromiser himself, and old General Wool, who was even older than Winfield Scott, and so many more—rousing themselves from the comforts of home and hearth and enduring a winter’s journey to once more offer service to their beloved country.

At their head was the venerable John Tyler, the former president, who had become dismayed at the sight of the Senate allowing Senator Crittenden’s compromise to slip though its fingers, and who, as a private citizen, had lobbied his state of Virginia to call this meeting to perhaps save the country from the path of destruction it seemed hell-bent on following.

Frankly, the heart beat a little faster to see these silver-haired gentlemen answer patriotism’s call.

The warm feelings, alas, did not long endure. These are, after all, men whose failure when they were in their prime to do more than patch over the question of slavery has resulted in a bill that has at long last come due. The thought that their stooped shoulders were covered in a mantle of wisdom proved as evanescent as a summer morning’s dew.

It has not taken long to be reminded that the seventy-year-old President Tyler has always been far more admired for his “animal spirits”—he has a comely wife three decades his junior who has just borne him his fifteenth child—than he is respected for his political acumen. (Remember, he is the only president who lost his entire Cabinet to resignation, and who alienated Congressional leaders by vetoing a banking bill for the second time after Congress accommodated all the objections he raised the first time around, and who is the first president to have had impeachment charges against him considered.)

The greater burden that this conference must carry, however, is that not enough people wish it well. None of the states that have seceded, for example, have sent delegates, nor has Arkansas, nor have the Pacific Coast states. Republican bedrock states like Michigan and Wisconsin are underrepresented, and the delegates who are attending are acting as henchmen, ready to strangle in the crib any compromises that show any potential for success. “Send stiff-backed men” to the conference, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan told his governor, adding, “Without a little bloodletting, this Union will not, in my opinion, be worth a rush.”

Summoned to transcend the intransigence of Congress, the delegates are duplicating it—albeit in an entirely extra-constitutional way, since there is no article that provides, in the event of inaction by Congress, for a convocation of grandfathers to take over the arena. Still, they will continue to meet; the fire is warm at Willard’s, the spirits are plentiful, and there is nothing ahead for most of these men except another long and bumpy carriage ride and the resumption of irrelevancy. And of course, there is some wan hope that they may locate a solution. Should you be visiting Washington this month, drop by the Willard; there is no finer exhibition of political fossils, as Horace Greeley has dubbed them, in the land.

One augury that the Peace Convention is not and perhaps never has been destined for success is that on the same day President Tyler was taking up the gavel as chairman, his eighteen-year-old granddaughter, Letitia, was at the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, hoisting the flag over the first meeting of a convention of the Southern states that had come together to explore forming a government.

The idea had arisen in the mind of the South Carolina ultra Robert Rhett, who in late December invited representatives of all of the slaveholding states to come to Montgomery to discuss forming a Southern Confederacy. (Apparently, the idea that South Carolina would take its place among the world’s nations as an independent palmetto republic was never the first choice.) By last week, thirty-seven representatives from six of the seven seceded states (absent Texas, still awaiting the outcome of a statewide ratifying vote) assembled in Mississippi. One observer, the wife of a delegate, was no more impressed by the assemblage than Horace Greeley was with the Peace Conventioneers in Washington. “Whenever there is an election they hunt up some old fossil ages ago laid on the shelf,” she confided. “There never was such a resurrection of the dead and forgotten.”

But where she saw a tired political establishment, others saw many of the region’s most talented and experienced leaders, Alexander Stephens, Howell Cobb and his brother Thomas, Robert Toombs, and Robert Rhett included. Under the direction of Howell Cobb, the convention moved with alacrity. After a handful of unusually productive sessions, it adopted a provisional constitution for what it was calling the Confederate States of America.

Of course, the document isn’t an entirely original composition, but is heavily based on the Constitution of the country they were shedding. There are a few key departures: The provisional constitution places a greater emphasis on states’ rights; enacts a few reforms, including limiting the president to a single six-year term; permits a tariff for building revenue but not for protection (and does not describe how one can tell the difference); and establishes an emphatic, unambiguous guarantee of the right to own, transport, and retrieve slaves.

Even taking into account that they were working from a template, the delegates’ decisiveness was impressive. Also impressive was what they left out of the new constitution: the reinstitution of the African slave trade, something that had been an objective of the ultras for years. Clearly this was a concession to Virginia and the states of the upper South, which are more widely split on the subject of disunion. So repelled by extremists both North and South, many moderates in the middle of the country have begun thinking that if a split is inevitable, they ought to form a third union of states encompassing the slaveholding states of the upper South plus Pennsylvania—a mid-Atlantic federation held together by similar economic interests and values. This is an alarming possibility to the ultras, for it would jeopardize the long-term prospects of the cotton belt federation and all but end the dream of building a slaveholding empire that would dominate the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

And so the convention underscored its moderate intentions. It chose Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens to be president and vice president of the new Confederacy. Not Yancey nor Rhett nor the brilliant but bibulous Toombs, nor either of the Cobb brothers, nor any of the fire-eaters who had midwifed this moment, but Davis, the war hero who is admired for his intellect and his civility in the Senate and especially for the skill he demonstrated as secretary of war; and Stephens, the man who only one month ago was eloquently maintaining that Georgia should remain in the Union. Calmly and reasonably, the selections seek to reassure the people of the upper South. You see? We understand you. We are protecting the traditions we share. We are securing our way of life.

And so in the Excelsior Hotel of Montgomery, they are dreaming of empire. In the Willard Hotel in Washington, they are dreaming of peace. And elsewhere in Washington, Senator William Seward, presumed to be the future secretary of state, is dreaming of war. Not a civil war against the South, but a war against somebody else. Almost anyone else. Reportedly, Rudolf Schleiden, the minister from Bremen, has sent home dispatches that quote or paraphrase Seward as saying, “If the Lord would only give the United States an excuse for a war with England, France, or Spain, that would be the best means of reestablishing internal peace.” Schleiden has Seward saying that nothing would please him more than if a European power interfered on behalf of South Carolina, for then he could “pitch into the European Power, and South Carolina and the seceding states would soon join him in doing so.”

Schleiden’s report reads quite similar to a message recently sent to London by the British minister in Washington, Lord Richard Lyons, who said that after talking with Seward on a number of occasions, he thought it likely Seward would start taking anti-British stands to shift the public’s attention to a foreign threat. Lyons’ interpretation seems to be confirmed by the Duke of Newcastle, who says Seward told him, “If I am to be secretary of state, it will become my duty to insult England, and I mean to do so.” The Duke had little choice but to interpret this comment as a threat. But Thurlow Weed, Seward’s protector and champion, assured the Duke that the Senator was merely offering a pleasantry.

None of these comments are much different from remarks Seward made at a dinner of the New England Society last December. “I am very sure that if anybody was to make a descent upon New York tomorrow,” he said to great applause, “whether Louis Napoleon, or the Prince of Wales, or his mother, or the Emperor of Russia or Austria, I believe all the hills of South Carolina would pour forth their population to the rescue of New York, and I do know that if any one of these powers were to make a descent upon Charleston and South Carolina, I know who would go to their rescue.”

As the dying king tells the young Prince Harry in Henry IV, Part 2, “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” No doubt Mr. Seward knows his Shakespeare.

Verbatim

A Little Blood-Letting

A letter to the Honorable Austin Blair, Governor of Michigan, from Senator Zachariah Chandler, requesting the appointment of delegates to the Washington Peace Conference, February 9, 1861

My Dear Governor:

Governor Bingham and myself telegraphed you yesterday, at the request of Massachusetts and New York, to send delegates to the Peace Congress. They admit that we were right and they were wrong, that no Republican should have sent delegates. But they are here, and cannot get away. Ohio, Indiana and Rhode Island are caving in, and there is danger of Illinois; and now they beg us . . . to come to their rescue, and save the Republican party from rupture. I hope you will send stiff-backed men, or none.

Truly your friend,

Z. Chandler

P.S. Some of the manufacturing states think a fight would be awful. Without a little blood-letting, this Union will not, in my estimation, be worth a rush.

No Greater Task

The farewell address of Abraham Lincoln to the town of Springfield, February 11, 1861

My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

To Govern Is to Coerce

From an editorial in the Hartford Daily Courant (Connecticut), February 11, 1861

One of the bug-bears that the Secessionists have created for the purpose of frightening the timid, is that of Coercion. It is a magic word, but unfortunately its magic applies only to the Federal Government. You cannot coerce a Sovereign State, say these State Right Abstractionists. Is that so? Is our Government so powerless against domestic traitors? Are its hands so tied that it cannot protect its own property against the lawless seizures of State authority? If so, it is a glaring, gross defect in our Constitution. It is worth nothing as a Government, unless there is some idea of force in its very construction. To “govern” means to “coerce.” It is involved in the very idea of Government.

17.

Two Journeys, Destination Unknown

February 16, 1861

TWO MEN, born less than eight months and fewer than 100 miles apart, but fated to follow distinctly different paths to prominence and authority. Two presidents, one chosen by fewer than 40 percent of the voters, the other chosen by fewer than forty delegates from a mere six states, now entrusted with the responsibility of peace and war. Two journeys, each proceeding from the comforts of home to the capital of a nation facing a precarious, unpredictable future.

One of the men, who possesses the appearance and experience of a president, has been heralded as the Washington of his people. The other, who in some quarters is said to express “all the rough manners and coarse sayings of the clown,” has already said that Washington’s challenge was easier than the one he now faces.

A mere fortnight after offering a gracious and sentimental resignation from the Senate, where he had long championed the expansion of slavery while discouraging talk of secession, Jefferson Davis returned to Brierfield, his beloved plantation in Mississippi. Hoping for a period of rest following nearly a decade of public service—“I have entered upon the most agreeable of labors, planting shrubs and trees and directing operations of my field,” he told a friend—Davis nonetheless accepted the position of Major General in the armed forces of Mississippi.

As a graduate of West Point who heroically led forces in the Battle of Monterrey in the Mexican conflict, Davis was expecting, even hoping, to receive a military command should war with the North prove inevitable. Instead, last week he received a telegram from Robert Toombs and Robert Rhett. They were in Montgomery at the convention of six of the seceded states, which had moved with unexpected alacrity in forming a new government and adopting a constitution. “Sir: We are directed to inform you that you are this day unanimously elected President of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America, and to request you to come to Montgomery immediately.” Davis relayed the message, his wife has said, “as a man might speak of a sentence of death.”

And yet, sparing only enough time to pack and to say goodbye to his family and his slaves, he set off for Montgomery on the morning.

The capital of the new Confederacy is barely 200 miles from Brierfield, but the haphazard development of Southern railroads forced Davis into a circuitous sojourn north from Vicksburg to Memphis, then south to Atlanta, and only then west to Montgomery. The trip took five days to complete, and during the 800-mile tour, Davis made twenty-five speeches. His first audiences in Tennessee were chilly—voters there and also in North Carolina this very week rejected calls to hold conventions on secession—but boisterous crowds in Georgia and Mississippi greeted him with bonfires and artillery salutes.

Davis—tall, gaunt, austere, plagued with a filmy right eye—possesses a formal speaking style perfectly suited to the well of the Senate and seldom strays into the colloquial oratory most successful on train platforms. Still, he pled and preached the promise of a new nation to his utmost, and his audiences overlooked his limitations. He told the crowds in Jackson, “If only the North would recognize our independence, all would be well.” He told Athens, “We have separated from them, and separated forever.” At stop after stop, he denounced the “hell-born fanaticism of the North,” promised that “there will be no war in our territory; it will be carried into the enemy’s territory” and predicted quick diplomatic recognition from Britain and France. And everywhere his audience cheered. He also told his listeners to prepare for “a long and bloody conflict,” and they cheered just the same.

While Davis traveled his loop from Vicksburg to Montgomery in relative isolation—he was accompanied by some men from his regiment, the First Mississippi, but not many more were among his entourage—Abraham Lincoln set out from Springfield, Illinois, in a comparative circus caravan. Joining the president-elect on a trip that has been scheduled to last almost two weeks were his wife, children, in-laws, friends, political allies, advisers and cronies, bodyguards, military men, and journalists. They were joined at every stop by old pals, party stalwarts, office-seekers, hangers-on, and the simply curious who turned out to see the one-time rail-splitter, grocery clerk, and bargee who was now the pride of Hoosierdom. After five days, Lincoln and the small city that is accompanying him have reached Buffalo, where the president-elect is scheduled to dine tomorrow with former president Millard Fillmore, one of the few former office-holders who has not been roosting in the Willard Hotel in Washington, nominally attending a Peace Conference.

Lincoln, who has all but adopted the disciplined silence of a monk since the election, is taking the opportunity of this tour to recover his powers of speech. After giving a lovely, sentimental valediction at Springfield, the president-elect has so far also given remarks at Decatur, Tolono, Danville, Thornton, Lebanon, Indianapolis, Shelbyville, Greensburg, Cincinnati, Columbus, Lebanon, Pittsburgh, Bayard, Ravenna, Cleveland, Ashtabula, Erie, and perhaps a dozen other towns. He is merry and folksy but, having so long played the sphinx, he is inevitably out of practice, and has carelessly dropped some ill-phrased remarks that have combusted in his wake.

In Indianapolis, he dubiously pondered the very legitimacy of the concept of states’ rights, wondering what gives a state “the right to break up and ruin [a] nation as a matter of original principle?” This, of course, generated a round of approval by the usual approvers, but the Louisville Journal labeled the speech “a singular indiscretion” and the Cleveland Plain Dealer suggested Lincoln “finally opened his mouth and . . . got his foot in it.” Even his most loyal friends admitted in private that this was the sort of thought that would have been uttered more safely after Lincoln had taken the oath of office.

Two days later, in Columbus, the president-elect detonated another verbal explosive. “There is nothing going wrong,” he said. “We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.” The idea that nothing was going wrong landed strangely on the ears of almost everyone, but an undaunted Lincoln returned to this trope in Pittsburgh, and again later in the day, in a snowstorm in Cleveland. “Why all this excitement? Why all these complaints? As I said before, this crisis is all artificial. It has no foundation in facts. It was not argued up, as the saying is, and cannot therefore be argued down. Let it alone and it will go down itself.”

One understands the president-elect’s tactic: By representing himself as a reasonable man and the secessionists as the fire-eaters and the ultras, he hopes to placate the undecided slaveholders of the upper South and prevent them from throwing in with the rebels. Still, in the face of almost daily reports of seizures of federal forts and arsenals, and with the ongoing stand-off in Charleston Harbor, Mr. Lincoln’s words seem condescending. Certainly they are hard to square with Mr. Davis’s sobering warning to prepare for a long and bloody war.

Indeed, as though to mock Mr. Lincoln, on the very next day after he spoke in Pittsburgh, in San Antonio a man named Ben McCulloch, a legendary Texas Ranger and famous Indian fighter, captured the Army’s entire Department of Texas. Riding at the head of several hundred volunteers who styled themselves the Committee for Public Safety, McCulloch confronted General David Twiggs, the seventy-year-old commander of the Texas Department. Twiggs, who is from Georgia, had been asking Washington for instructions about what to do should Texas secede, while making no efforts to hide his secessionist sympathies. “If an old woman with a broomstick should come with full authority from the state of Texas to demand the public property,” Twiggs has been muttering, “I would give it to her.” Upon McCulloch’s appearance, Twiggs promptly surrendered his forts, equipment, and the 3,000 troops under his command. So much for the artificial crisis.

There was one moment of potential volatility that did pass this week with all the placidity and calm that Mr. Lincoln could ever have wanted. On Wednesday, the House and Senate were scheduled to meet in joint session for the official declaration of the results of the vote of the Electoral College. Since December, Vice President John Breckinridge, himself the recipient of the second greatest number of those votes, had kept the results in two sealed boxes, waiting for February 13 when he and an assistant would carry the boxes to the House chamber, open them, tally the contents, and declare the next president.

As the date approached, it seemed ever more pregnant with the possibility of danger. Mr. Breckinridge and his boxes seemed especially vulnerable, rumored disruptions seemed entirely too likely, and the impact of a disruption on the legitimacy of succession seemed altogether too malignant. (In one scenario, the proceedings would be aborted, the election results voided, and Vice President Breckinridge himself would assume the presidency!)

With Southern sympathizers in Washington outnumbered only by whispers of cabals, General Winfield Scott boldly asserted his intentions. Positioning cannon outside the Capitol and deploying troops on the avenues, the old general fairly invited a challenge. “Any man who attempts by force or unparliamentary disorder to obstruct or interfere with the lawful count of the electoral vote . . . should be lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of a window of the Capitol,” growled Scott. “I would manure the hills of Arlington with fragments of his body.”

But apart from a theatrical tantrum thrown by Muscoe Garnett, a congressman from Virginia, who huffed out of the ceremony stamping his feet, the event passed in solemnity and dignity, and Vice President Breckinridge announced that Abraham Lincoln had won a four-year term as president, to commence on March 4. Reading the news in a telegram that afternoon in Columbus, Lincoln smiled benignly.

Verbatim

A Critical Day

From the diary of George Templeton Strong, February 13, 1861

The electoral votes were counted today, and as I hear no extras in the streets, they were probably counted in due form, and the result announced without disturbance. This was the critical day for the peace of the capital. A foray of Virginia gents, with Governor Wise at their head and Governor Floyd at the tail, could have done infinite mischief by destroying the legal evidence of Lincoln’s election (after they had killed and beaten General Scott and his Flying Artillery, that is).

No Comparison

From an editorial in the Philadelphia Morning Pennsylvanian, February 18, 1861

Two inaugurations are upon the tapis. One occurs to-day at Montgomery, the other on the 4th of March, at Washington. The first is the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, President elect of the Southern Confederation, the other the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, the President elect of the United States. The new confederacy commences with six States. In a short time it will have eight, and unless our national difficulties shall be speedily adjusted, it will, before the lapse of many months, comprise fifteen States, two more than the old thirteen.

Jefferson Davis’ election was not one whit more sectional in its character than Abraham Lincoln’s. If no Northern State helped to elect the former, neither did any Southern State help to elect the latter. If both the President and Vice President of the Southern Confederacy are Southern men and slaveholders, both the President and Vice President of this Confederacy are Northern men and free-soilers. Like begets like, and the sectional programme and anti-slavery policy of the Black Republicans drove the cotton States into the formation of a sectional Government and a slavery policy. But for the first, the last would not have existence.

These two administrations will start almost simultaneously. The one is small, the other large. The one asks peace, and to be let alone. The other threatens coercion and war. The one is persecuted, the other a persecutor. One protects slave property as it protects all other property. The other makes war upon slave property, as it does not upon any other property.

The President of the Southern Confederacy is a gentleman, a scholar, a soldier, and a statesman. He has attained eminence in every department of life to which he has turned his attention, and his name is the very synonym of purity and honor. Like the Chevalier Bayard, he is without fear and without reproach.

The President elect of the United States is neither a scholar, a soldier, nor a statesman. He has some experience as a Nisi Prius lawyer and a local politician—more, if we may trust his Republican biographers, as a flat boatman and a rail splitter. Without the polished elegance of the well bred man, he has all the rough manners and coarse sayings of the clown.

Between these men there can be no comparison. It is all contrast. The young Republic puts forward its best men; the old Republic puts forward its most indifferent men. A great political game is about to open, of which nations will be the witnesses.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, we fear, desires to add civil war to disunion. JEFFERSON DAVIS, we hope, looks forward to the time when the six States of which he is President, unthreatened by stripes, may be lighted back from the darkness of secession into the wide portals of our Union, by the serene stars that glitter in our firmament.

18.

A Circumspect President, a Furtive President-Elect

February 23, 1861

SUNDERED FROM THE CARAVAN of family, friends, backers, and associates who had been accompanying his odyssey to Washington, the president-elect of the United States arrived in the nation’s capital just before dawn on Saturday, unheralded, unannounced, and, obscured by a slouch hat and his new whiskers, nearly incognito. Attended only by burly bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon and the Scottish private detective Allan Pinkerton, Abraham Lincoln left his humble sleeper and was making his way though the thinly populated Baltimore & Ohio train depot when a stranger lunged into his path crying, “Abe, you can’t play that on me!”

The quick-reacting bodyguards roughly intercepted the man and were prepared to pummel him when Lincoln spoke up. “Don’t strike him! Don’t you know him? It’s Washburne!”

Elihu Washburne, to be precise—a friend and congressman from Illinois whose actions, during the months of Lincoln’s silence that have passed since the election, could reliably be interpreted as an authoritative clue to what the president-elect thought and wanted done. Washburne rose early to serve as a one-man welcoming committee for the incoming president, and had earned a near throttling for his troubles.

But Lincoln’s men were well entitled to their hair-trigger reactions. In Philadelphia not thirty-six hours before, Lincoln had been presented with persuasive evidence developed from two credible and distinct sources that assassins were planning to kill him when his party passed through Baltimore. A hotbed of secession, Baltimore had earned the unlovely sobriquet “Mob City” after vicious riots disrupted election days in 1856, 1857, 1858, and 1859. The plan, according to Pinkerton’s sources and John Kennedy, the superintendent of the New York Metropolitan Police, was for assassins to strike after Lincoln debarked the Inauguration Special at Baltimore Calvert Street Station. Once Lincoln entered the terminal’s narrow vestibule, Plug Uglies outside the station would stage a riot. This fracas would draw the attention of Lincoln’s bodyguards and the local police, leaving the president-elect vulnerable to killers posing as travelers. Members of the cabal, Lincoln was told, had drawn lots to see which would have the honor of striking the lethal blow.

Lincoln’s advisers offered different responses to the threat, among them the recommendation of Colonel Edwin “Bull Head” Sumner of the Army that the president-elect surround himself with a squad of cavalry and “cut our way to Washington.” Lincoln instead adopted a quieter approach: He would keep the next day’s advertised appearances at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and in Harrisburg, but instead of leaving for Baltimore after breakfast on Saturday, as planned, would depart Friday evening and backtrack to Philadelphia. There the president-elect, Pinkerton and Lamon, as well as Lamon’s pistols, brass knuckles, black-jack, and Bowie knife (and whatever Pinkerton was packing), would sequester themselves in a sleeper car for a midnight trip across the Susquehanna, into and through a seething, hostile Baltimore in the wee hours, and on to a gray, reluctant daybreak in Washington.

Lincoln’s tense but happily anti-climactic midnight ride brought to a whispered end a long, loud, often jubilant and highly public journey of 1,900 miles through seven states. The low moment of the journey—the assassination threat excepted—was his awkward meeting with New York City’s pro-South Democratic mayor, Fernando Wood, who had been making headlines with a half-baked proposal for his city, whose commerce with the slave states generated handsome profits, to become an independent country. The high-handed Wood insolently advised the president-elect to return the nation to its “former harmonious, consolidated and prosperous condition.” Patiently but pointedly, Lincoln reaffirmed his dedication to preserving the Union, “under which not only the commercial city of New York, but the whole country, has acquired its greatness.” Afterwards, Lincoln offered a more acerbic dismissal of Wood’s separatist vision: “I reckon that it will be some time before the front door sets up housekeeping on its own terms.”

By contrast, the high point was in Philadelphia the following day, where Lincoln personally raised a flag with a thirty-fourth star for the new state of Kansas to the top of the flagpole at Independence Hall. Connecting his principles to those promulgated by the Founding Fathers in that very building—“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence”—Lincoln presented the thousands crowding Chestnut Street with his stark interpretation of that document’s revolutionary promise. “It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land,” he said. “It was that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men.”

Two days previously and 800-odd miles to the southwest, the venerable document was also invoked before a crowd of 10,000, this one assembled to witness the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederate States. A festive mood prevailed as Davis and his vice president, Alexander Stephens, were carried through Montgomery’s flower-bedecked streets to the capitol in an open carriage drawn by six white horses, while the band played selections light-hearted (the catchy “Dixie”) and full of bravado (“La Marseillaise”).

But Davis’s address conveyed a different tone. In the Senate, the austere, even ascetic former Army officer was given to long, flowery addresses, but here he was plain and legalistic. “Our present position . . . illustrates the American idea that government rests upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish a government whenever it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established,” he said. “When in the judgment of the sovereign states now comprising this Confederacy the union had been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained . . . an appeal to the ballot box declared that so far as they were concerned the government created by that compact should cease to exist. In this they merely asserted a right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 defined to be inalienable.”

Presumably, the ballots that elected delegates to a Secession Convention have a sanctity that the ballots cast to elect Mr. Lincoln do not. But Mr. Davis did not elaborate.

At all times did the speech remain calm. Davis never attempted to ignite the rhetorical pyrotechnics the way so many of his erstwhile Senate colleagues on both sides of the secession question have done these past several months. There was no itemization of incidents that revealed the North’s perfidy; just an assessment, regrettable but firm, that because of these unspoken offenses, the time has come to part—“as a necessity, not a choice.” Nor was there any mention by Davis of slavery, of its justifications or its necessity to Southern civilization or the North’s assaults upon the institution, all lines of argument that figured so prominently in the Ordinances of Secession in six of the seven departed states.

Instead, Davis gravely referred to the threat of war five times, citing the “hostile opposition” to Southern independence and the “wanton aggression on the part of others.” The South is the aggrieved party, Davis argued, that wants only to walk its own path in peace. “But if this be denied us, and the integrity and jurisdiction of our territory be assailed, it will but remain for us with a firm resolve to appeal to arms and invoke the blessings of Providence upon a just cause.”

It was a sobering note, one at odds with the team of six white horses and the choruses of “Dixie,” and Davis further underscored the mood with a note of humility. “Experience . . . has taught me that care and toil and disappointments are the price of official elevation. You will have many errors to forgive, many deficiencies to tolerate, but you will not find in me either a want of zeal or fidelity to a cause that has my highest hopes and most enduring affection.”

Not forty-eight hours before, Davis had arrived in Montgomery and was heralded by a jovial William Lowndes Yancey. The fire-eater’s fire-eater, the short, rotund, front-toothless Alabaman is notorious for his temper. He reportedly responded to taunts from Northern students at Williams College by heaving a pickle barrel through a window—an event that seemed more significant five years later when he was convicted of manslaughter for killing his wife’s uncle, Dr. Robinson Earle, in a street brawl in Greenville, South Carolina.

In the past, Yancey held little regard for the cautious Davis. But at this juncture he realizes his cause can be better served by a reluctant rebel than a rabid one. Before a cheering throng, the ebullient Yancey introduced Davis, shouting, “The man and the hour have met!” Davis responded with fire. “The time for compromise has now passed! The South is determined to maintain her position, and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel!”

What accounts for the change in Davis’s tone in so short of time? Perhaps the new executive has received word of the inventory of the South’s armaments that is being conducted. The sobering results show the South has about 150,000 arms in its arsenals, though chiefly smooth-bore muskets, not rifles; no equipment for infantry, artillery or cavalry; no rifle powder, and only about 60,000 pounds of superannuated cannon powder; just 250,000 percussion guns; no gun-making machinery in the arsenals (no firearms or gun carriages have been made in the South in fifty years); no rifle-powder mills; and only one cannon foundry in the entire South, and that is the Tredegar Works in Richmond, Virginia, which at this moment is still part of the Union.

Or perhaps it was the difference between torchlight and daylight that accounts for the mood. It is a small challenge to rile up the rebellious, but Davis knows that the next phase of this crisis has begun. Now he and Lincoln will vie for the allegiance of the eight remaining slave-holding states. It will be up to them to decide whether this breakaway confederation will expand enough to stand down the wealthier, more populous remainder of the Union. Surely the people in those states that form the broad belt between the most ardent Northerners and the most fiery Southerners understand that no matter which side they choose, if matters come down to the smell of powder and the touch of steel, the contest will mostly happen on their farms, in their fields, and in their towns.

Verbatim

An Organized Conspiracy

From an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer (Pennsylvania), February 20, 1861

Davis, the Presidential pretender, most solemnly, perhaps Pecksniffianly, goes on to say, that “He who knows the hearts of men, will judge of the sincerity with which we labored to preserve the Government of our fathers, &c.” It is rather hard to realize that. There is good reason to believe that, for years past, there has been an organized conspiracy on the part of Southern politicians to break up the Union for their selfish personal purposes, with or without reason applicable to their fellow citizens. Indeed, even now, can any man tell what is the actual cause or what are the genuine causes of the present Secession? If any one on the side of treason has done this intelligibly or in aught but general terms of abuse, we have never heard or read such a statement. Southerners have declared that it was not the election of Lincoln; not the alleged non-execution of the fugitive slave law; not the personal liberty bills . . . Mr. Davis certainly does not give any clue to answer this question. He does not pretend that those who wished so much to save the Constitution, ever made any appeal in any proper manner, to the authorities established by the instrument itself. The thing was concocted long before the late election. Its result was just what the conspirators desired and worked for in the Charleston and Baltimore Conventions, and the deed was done in holes and corners, by caucuses and mobs, with riot, precipitation, and crime. That was a rather singular way to show a devotion to the Union, for which the Almighty is invoked.

The Democratic Touch

From the diary of Mary Chesnut, in Montgomery, Alabama, February 1861

At dinner, Judge Withers was loudly abusive of the Provisional Congress (already?) He said “They had trampled the Constitution underfoot. They have provided President Davis with a house!” It is hardly worth while wasting time in quarrels about nonessentials. He was disgusted with the folly of parading the president at the inauguration in a coach drawn by six white horses. (I thought that was all right.) Then someone said Mrs. Fitzpatrick (the wife of Senator Benjamin Fitzpatrick) was the only lady who sat with the Congress—and after the inaugural poked Jeff Davis in the back with her parasol that he might turn and speak to her. “I’m sure that was democratic enough,” said someone.

March 1861

19.

Many Mouths, Few Ears

March 1, 1861

IN THIS LONG and ominous secession season, Washington has whipsawed between turbulence and torpor, between the pressing urge to do something and the prudent dictum to wait for the new man. This week, with Abraham Lincoln finally present on the scene and his installation in office imminent, there has been a sudden cascade of activity, a dash to solve the problem that has been festering now for months. Most of what transpired this week, however, was sound and fury signifying nothing—the usual result of too much talking and too little listening.

From their roosts in Willard’s Hotel, the old pigeons of the Peace Convention completed their monument to ineffectiveness. Assembled more in the hope than the belief that the Solons of yesteryear could solve the country’s most wrenching problem by summoning the wisdom and resolve that their sons do not possess, these shells of their former selves spent three weeks in Willard’s parlors, striking self-satisfied postures of defiance and concern. In the end, they came up with the same set of responses to the crisis that had been in front of America since before Christmas—agreements and bargains highly similar to those Senator John Crittenden devoted months of his life to creating.

And indeed, they barely did that, voting against proposal after proposal until the colorful Commodore Robert Stockton of New Jersey—hero of the Battle of Baltimore in 1812, pirate hunter, entrepreneur, filibustero, and former senator—sent the delegates into a recess with a final cri de coeur: “The country is in jeopardy and we are called upon to save it,” he said. “Politics should not be thought of in view of the question of disunion. By what measure of execration will posterity judge a man who contributed toward the dissolution of the Union? Shall we stand here and higgle about terms when the roar of the tornado is heard that threatens to sweep our government from the face of the earth? . . . In the days of Rome, Curtius threw himself into the chasm when told by the oracle that the sacrifice of his life would save his country. Alas! Is there no Curtius here?”

When the conference reconvened, it approved by a nine to eight vote a plan that was promptly submitted to the Congress, where a Senate committee all but sneered at the proposals in defeating them twenty-eight to seven. The House declined to even consider them. All those weeks spent talking, and in the end, no one listened.

In fairness, the House had a packed agenda. In the other body, Senators Simon Cameron and John Hale were occupying the floor in order to mock the folly of appropriating funds to support the Smithsonian Institution. One group was pushing a bill that would call for a Constitutional Convention to discuss the issue of secession (a late-arriving idea that might have done some good when President Buchanan first floated it in November). Another group of moderates led by Representative Dan Sickles of New York tried to get the Crittenden Compromise back on the floor, perhaps hoping that Lincoln might like the idea more as president than he did when he had the plan killed at Christmas. To head off Sickles this time, Representative Tom Corwin introduced a Constitutional amendment that would prevent any federal interference with slavery in the places where it already existed. Even though this measure had Lincoln’s lukewarm approval, radical Republicans stopped it with a procedural roadblock.

So nothing was accomplished on Tuesday. On Wednesday, chaos erupted. Like a child who spends an afternoon repeatedly stacking blocks and then smashing the stacks, the House called bill after bill to a vote, only to defeat each seriatim. First the call for a Constitutional Convention lost. Then the Sickles plan lost. Corwin managed to get the introductory resolutions to his amendment passed, but then lost on the next round when he failed to win approval by the two-thirds majority amendments require.

On Thursday, a stunning reversal as Republicans pulled off a parliamentary maneuver and got the amendment back on the floor. Just when it seemed that it would once again fall short of achieving the necessary two-thirds majority, arms were twisted and seven members switched votes either in favor or to abstain, and the amendment passed.

Now it sits in the Senate, awaiting its turn on the legislative queue with the unstoppable, unsinkable, unquenchable Crittenden Compromise, which has been resurrected in the upper chamber. The thinking is that the hard reality of a Confederate government in Montgomery might at long last soften the unyielding radical Republican line, but so far the abolitionists show no movement. “This is not a question of compromise,” said Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan. “This is a question of whether we have, or have not, a government. . . . We are told that six states have seceded, and that the Union is broken up; and all we can do is send commissioners to treat with traitors with arms in their hands; treat with men who have fired upon your flag; treat with men who have seized your custom-houses, who have erected batteries upon your navigable waters and who now stand defying your authority. Sir, I will never submit to this degradation. I would rather join the Commanches.”

“God forbid, I hope not,” quipped Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas. “They have already suffered much from their contact with the whites.” The waggish Wigfall is an ardent secessionist who continues to sit in the Senate and make secessionist speeches while collecting a federal salary, even though his state seceded some weeks ago. Perhaps this is more evidence of his lively wit.

Even if this proposed amendment passes the Senate, it will not become part of the Constitution until it is ratified by three-quarters of the states. At present, this would include the seven seceded states, making the political calculus more inscrutable than anything devised by the German Leibniz.

It is ironic, of course, that it is these seven states that the amendment was most written to appease and it is these seven who clearly no longer have an interest. The challenge is now not to find phrases that will soothe South Carolina’s feelings. She is gone. She and her sisters are not open to terms of reconstruction. Washington talks and talks and talks, but the ears that need to hear these proposals are open to hearing no more. They have absconded to Montgomery (Wigfall excepted).

Things may change, of course. The great momentum for secession has abated. The passions felt in Charleston in December are viewed more coolly in the upper South today. No one knows what the future holds for the Confederate States of America, if whether a year from now it will still consist of the same seven states, sitting on an underpopulated shelf on the underside of North America, or if will it swell in size, population, and wealth with the addition of some or all of the other slave states. Will the Confederate States become a glorious slaveholding Caribbean empire, or a small collection of ill-coordinated states full of unhappy Unionists and unquiet slaves, bordered on the south by a hostile Mexico and on the north by an unfriendly U.S.A.? In that case, perhaps the existence of a slave amendment might pave the way for reconciliation.

Ultimately, the decision of the Virginia Secession Convention in Richmond, now having met for fourteen days of debate with no end in sight, will go a long way toward defining that future path. Virginia—gigantic, rich, influential, home to Mount Vernon, Monticello, Williamsburg, and other shrines of the Revolution—will undoubtedly set the example for other upper South states that are unsure about departing the Union.

The debates in Richmond have been colored by a particular skepticism. Largely absent are the heated justifications of slavery and the recitations of wrongs that have been inflicted, which have become staples of the other secession conventions. Here, the practicality of disunion is being judged. The departed states, it is pointed out, would like a resumption of the international slave trade, which the upper South states, who profit from the internal slave trade, do not. The departed states, it is noted, want to end the tariff and raise money through direct taxation, something that would affect Virginia, with her large population and varied industries, particularly harshly. Raising a new army, building a new navy, creating a new diplomatic corps, all will cost the departing states many millions.

Which of the upper South states will join the Confederacy and help Virginia bear those costs? “Delaware assuredly will not,” noted delegate Samuel Moore of Rockbridge. “Maryland is bankrupt the moment she attempts it. She has built her railroad to the Ohio River—she is dependent upon the proceeds of that road to pay the interest of her debt. We cannot count upon her then. Can we count upon Kentucky? Or Tennessee?”

So far the Richmond skeptics seem to be holding the ultras at bay, but the close of the Peace Convention did nothing to help their cause. Departing Willard’s as something less than the national savior he had expected himself to have become, ex-President Tyler assumed his seat the Secession Convention muttering about Northern stubbornness and describing the convention’s recommendations as “a poor, rickety, disconnected affair, not worthy of your acceptance.” Nor have moderates received much help from Mr. Lincoln. Some delegates met with the president-elect and implored him to make some gesture in favor of peace. Foreswear the use of troops against secessionists, one delegate, former Senator William Rives, urgently advised. Your agreement to do that might tip the balance, while your refusal will all but guarantee Virginia’s secession.

“Mr. Rives!” said an emphatic Lincoln, jumping from his chair. “If Virginia will stay in, I will withdraw the troops from Fort Sumter.”

It was a stunning offer, but ultimately hollow; it wouldn’t appease anyone in Virginia who wanted to go, and held no appeal for anyone who wanted to stay. And while the offer does provide an unguarded glimpse into Lincoln’s state of mind, ultimately his remark joins the Peace Convention’s stillborn proposals to an uninterested Congress and Congress’s menu of impotent entreaties to the departed slaveholders as examples of people speaking without benefit of listeners who mattered.

Regardless, by next week all of this week’s talking will have ceased and every ear will be attuned to the voice of one man. For four months, secession has challenged the existence of the American Republic, and people north and south have anxiously waited to hear how that man—not citizen Lincoln nor president-elect Lincoln, but a duly inaugurated, legally sworn-in sixteenth president of the United States Lincoln—will answer. The gauntlet of secession has been thrown in the old Union’s face. Next week its new president will at long last respond.

Verbatim

The Only Deduction

From the diary of George Templeton Strong, March 2, 1861

Much depends on the tone of Lincoln’s Inaugural next Monday. But I doubt if words will do much good now, however pacific, fair, and reasonable. . . . The logic of the situation is inexorable, and war is the only possible deduction from the premises. Civil war is at hand; within a week, if the fire-eaters of Charleston take the initiative and open their batteries on Fort Sumter, which they are like to do at once on reading a virile and honest Inaugural—and within sixty days, anyhow.

Redress It, If You Dare

From a speech delivered by Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas, March 2, 1861

I did think, at one time, there was going to be a war. I do not think so now. The Star of the West swaggered into Charleston harbor, received a blow planted full in the face, and staggered out. Your flag has been insulted; redress it, if you dare. You have submitted to it for two months, and you will submit to it forever.

No Disposition to Return

From an editorial in the New Orleans Daily Crescent (Louisiana), March 2, 1861

To talk about Crittenden’s proposition . . . or of anything else that looks to a reconstruction of the Union, is the sheerest nonsense. While the Border Slave States are anxiously looking to the Peace Conference at Washington, a large majority of the people of Louisiana feel no more interest in that Conference than they do in the proceedings of the London Board of Aldermen. They believe that it was gotten up for a patriotic purpose, but that the Northern States saw in it a chance for delay, and have merely kept it going until Lincoln could be inaugurated. . . . If there has been any indication, in any quarter of the seceded States, of a disposition to return to the Union on the Crittenden or any other proposition, we have yet to see it. The President of the Confederate States has declared that, in his opinion, the separation ought to be final and perpetual, and every representative man of Southern sentiment has said the same thing

The Southern Delusion

From an editorial in the Oshkosh Northwestern (Wisconsin), March 8, 1861

The idea is sometimes started that the South produces certain articles with which it can control the markets of the world. This is a very vague assertion, and can bear no critical examination. The sugar trade is the result of a protective tariff, and will probably decline as soon as that tariff is materially reduced. Indeed, a total reduction of duty will probably destroy every sugar plantation in the Southern States. Under the best circumstances, and by the aid of the highest tariff, the sugar crop has never been very large; and if the whole crop in the Southern States were lost, at once, it would not very materially affect the price of sugar anywhere. . . .

About three-quarters of the rice crop of the South is produced in South Carolina, and the value of the crop is about one-half the value of the sugar crop. The tobacco crop is almost exclusively confined to the “Border States,” and more than half is raised west of the Alleghenies. The former is produced everywhere in tropical countries, and the world . . . is not dependent upon any one country for the latter.

The cotton crop is the only one of the South, whose diminution or destruction can very seriously affect the business of the North, or of other countries, or over which the South ever could have sufficient control to produce derangement in financial or commercial circles. But . . . as clearly as the sun shines at noonday, that England is determined not to be dependent upon the South for her cotton. The South can never be said, properly, to control even the trade in cotton, for the seller is as dependent as the buyer and consumer; but England is determined not to allow the South to be even the greatest seller of cotton; and in two years the South will find competitors which will control her. And the manufacturers of New England will receive a part of the advantages of England’s exertion in that direction. In the mean time, it will be quite as important for the South to sell, as for the North to buy, as she is learning to her sorrow, every passing day.

The argument, therefore, that the Northerners are to be immense losers by Disunion is founded on an imperfect view of facts. . . . The argument is poor enough at the best. It only amounts to this: That we must give aid to slavery because, if we don’t, our trade will be injured, and our farms be worth less money. But we deny that even that is true, or that we need have any apprehensions of such a result.

On the Block

From the diary of Mary Chesnut, in Montgomery, Alabama, March 4, 1861

So I have seen a negro woman sold—up on the block—at auction. The woman on the block overtopped the crowd. I felt faint—seasick. The creature looked like my good little Nancy. She was a bright mulatto with a pleasant face. She was magnificently gotten up in silks and satins. She seemed delighted with it all—sometimes ogling the bidders, sometimes looking quite coy and modest, but her mouth never relaxed from her expanded grin of excitement. I daresay the poor thing knew who would buy her. . . .

You know how women sell themselves and are sold in marriage, from queens downward, eh?

You know what the Bible says about slavery—and marriage. Poor women. Poor slaves.

20.

The First Trick

March 5, 1861

THE OLD PUBLIC FUNCTIONARY attended his last public function yesterday.

Delayed a bit by a rash of last-minute bills that needed his signature, President Buchanan arrived at Willard’s Hotel a little past noon on Monday in order to escort his successor, as tradition demanded, to his inauguration. Together they were an incongruous pair: The outgoing president, short and round, wore a swallowtail coat and broad-brimmed silk hat, while the new man, long and lean, wore a black cashmere suit and his trademark black stovepipe hat. Mrs. Lincoln and her children had been escorted on ahead.

Traveling in the presidential barouche, they were followed by a long parade: bands, a float full of pretty girls, mounted marshals, color guards, honored veterans, and a phalanx of cavalrymen. On this sunny, festive day, President Buchanan’s feelings must have been bittersweet. At the head of a similar parade four years before, he began his presidency as one of the best-prepared political leaders ever to have assumed the office. He exits, after an economic panic and mounting sectional strife, with the country teetering so precariously on the brink of civil war that the rooftops of the buildings lining the route of this procession are crowned with sharpshooters and artillery pieces command the avenues. Buchanan’s reputation is in ruins; almost daily he suffers to see the words imbecilic, moronic, and traitorous affixed to his name. “My dear sir,” he said, addressing Mr. Lincoln at one point, “if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed.”

“Mr. President, I cannot say that I shall enter it with much pleasure,” Mr. Lincoln graciously replied, “but I assure you that I shall do what I can to maintain the high standards set by my illustrious predecessors who have occupied it.”

Few of the other remarks that President Buchanan happened to utter prior the ceremonies have been shared; no doubt his comments were full of the punctilious pleasantries the former ambassador perfected at the palace of St. Petersburg and the Court of St. James’s. But certainly what he was thinking as he sat on that exalted rostrum and listened to his successor’s address, one would dearly love to know. He has, after all, been scorned, and Lincoln celebrated by the very same editorialists. And yet, a number of the two men’s key statements have been nearly identical.

For example, when Lincoln said, “The Union of these states is perpetual . . . no government proper ever had provision in its organic law for its own termination,” President Buchanan no doubt recalled his annual message sent to Congress last December, where he said, “The Union of these states was designed to be perpetual. . . . Its framers never intended the absurdity of providing for its own destruction.”

There are other parallels. Where Lincoln said, “No state upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union,” Buchanan declared, “No state has a right upon its own to secede from the Union.” Where Lincoln vowed, “I shall take care that the laws . . . be faithfully executed,” Buchanan said, “My province is to execute the laws.” And while Lincoln said that the would use his power “to hold, occupy, and possess the property belonging to the government,” Buchanan offered a bit more flourish in saying, “It is my duty at all times to defend and protect the public property.”

Of course, the parallels eventually broke down. President Buchanan may have been waiting for Lincoln to imitate him, and blame, at length, the origins of the conflict on a quarter century’s worth of abolitionist provocations—just as Buchanan has done—but in his inaugural speech Lincoln was succinct. “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended,” he tartly summarized. “That is the only substantial dispute.” His tone left no doubt which opinion he holds.

And while Buchanan may have expected something similar to his long, lawyerly explanation of why the Constitution left him powerless to prevent states from seceding, President Lincoln, though not overtly threatening, was nonetheless clear that he feels far from impotent: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it.” Buchanan found no authorization for action in the Constitution; Lincoln sees one in his constitutionally mandated oath.

Reaction to President Lincoln’s address has run the gamut, not only among political views, but within them. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass was disappointed, telling friends that the speech, in which Lincoln “prostrated himself before the foul and withering curse of slavery,” was “little better than our worst fears.” The equally ardent abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, however, approved of the way the speech showed “a hand of iron in a velvet glove.”

Most of the voices in the seceded states, predictably enough, condemned the speech, with the Atlanta Confederacy calling it “a medley of ignorance, sanctimonious cant and tender-footed bullyism” and the Charleston Mercury saying that a “more lamentable display of feeble inability to grasp the circumstances of this momentous emergency could scarcely have been exhibited.”

And yet Alexander Stephens, the newly minted vice president of the Confederacy, is reported to have privately admired the inaugural address as “the most adroit state paper ever published on this continent.” The smirking secessionist Senator Wigfall, the fire-eating Edmund Ruffin and the legalistic disunionist Thomas Cobb have all concluded that Lincoln’s words mean war. But Lincoln’s old adversary, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, disagrees. “He does not mean coercion; he says nothing about retaking the forts, or Federal property,” said Douglas in response to queries. “Every point in the address is susceptible of a double construction, but I think he does not mean coercion.” And there are many editorialists—not from Northern cities but from Chattanooga and Raleigh and Lexington, all in slaveholding states that have yet to secede—who agree.

It is to these men, the pro-Unionists of the upper South, and especially to the delegates of the Virginia Secession Convention, to whom Lincoln was speaking when he said in the address, “My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.”

Call it coincidence, but when Lincoln faced a different conflict this week, he took the same approach. Consider: Senator Seward, the man long presumed to be the designated secretary of state, at the last moment withdrew his name from selection, apparently in protest that the new Cabinet would include Senator Chase of Ohio and other ironbacks who advocate taking a tougher, less conciliatory approach to the South than Senator Seward prefers.

Was it principle? Pique? A power grab? Regardless—rather than confront Seward’s demand directly, Lincoln responded with a two-pronged approach. He made it clear to a group of Seward’s friends that even though it would be regrettable to lose Seward, he was prepared to name to the State Department William Dayton, the attorney general of New Jersey. And of course he would keep Chase. At the same time, Lincoln wrote to Seward, requesting that he reconsider his withdrawal. In other words, he took a position and waited for Seward to make the next move. And Seward, of course, acquiesced. “I can’t let Seward take the first trick,” Lincoln told a confidant.

Lincoln had hoped to do something similar with the seceded states: take a strong position and then wait until they either came to him on terms he found acceptable or took responsibility for starting the conflict. Shockingly, Lincoln’s plan was dead before he could articulate it. Two hours before the swearing in, President Buchanan received an urgent message from Major Anderson at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, informing his superiors that he was running out of supplies. If not relieved—and Anderson estimated that because of the Confederate forces massed on the shore, it would take 20,000 men to accomplish that mission—he would have to surrender the fort in six weeks. Lincoln had devised a strategy that could be expressed in one phrase: Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. Now, suddenly, time was running out.

The news did not reach President Lincoln until early this afternoon, when the outgoing secretary of war, Joseph Holt, gave him a complete report—complete, that is, with explanations and assurances that the previous administration knew nothing of Major Anderson’s difficulties, that he had submitted no request for supplies, nor for reinforcements, nor had he warned about the construction of the rebels’ batteries and fortifications. By that point, Buchanan was on a train, on his way back to his beloved Wheatland.

The outgoing president conferred with Lincoln after receiving the news; at the reception at the White House after the inauguration, the two men had a tête-à-tête. Buchanan was observed to be doing nearly all the talking, holding forth with urgent animation. Was he imparting some final advice, sharing some guidance that would prove vital in the days ahead? “I think you will find the water of the right-hand well of the White House better than that at the left,” an eavesdropper overheard Buchanan say. Insights about the pantry and kitchen followed. The state of Fort Sumter was never a topic.

Verbatim

The Better Angels of Our Nature

From the inaugural address of President Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861

My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well, upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied, hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Civil War Must Now Come

From an editorial in the Richmond Enquirer (Virginia), March 5, 1861

Mr. Lincoln’s Inaugural Address is before our readers—couched in the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic, with the purpose of pursuing the promptings of fanaticism even to the dismemberment of the Government. . . . Civil war must now come. Sectional war, declared by Mr. Lincoln, awaits only the signal gun from the insulted Southern Confederacy, to light its horrid fires all along the borders of Virginia. No action of our Convention can now maintain the peace. She must fight. The liberty of choice is yet hers. She may march to the contest with her sister States of the South, or she must march to the conflict against them. There is left no middle course; there is left no more peace; war must settle the conflict, and the God of battle give victory to the right!

We must be invaded by Davis or by Lincoln. The former can rally fifty thousand of the best and bravest sons of Virginia, who will rush with willing hearts and ready hands to the standard that protects the rights and defends the honor of the South—for every traitor heart that offers aid to Lincoln there will be many, many who will glory in the opportunity to avenge the treason by a sharp and certain death. Let not Virginians be arrayed against each other, and since we cannot avoid war, let us determine that together, as people of the same State, we will defend each other, and preserve the soil of the State from the polluting foot of the Black Republican invader.

The question, “where shall Virginia go?” is answered by Mr. Lincoln. She must go to war—and she must decide with whom she wars—whether with those who have suffered her wrongs, or with those who have inflicted her injuries.

A President at Last

From an editorial in the Detroit Daily Tribune (Michigan), March 5, 1861

The address is just what the people had a right to expect—able, firm, conciliatory, true to principle and of transparent honesty. It will draw tighter from this day the cords of the Union, for it asserts the dignity and power of the Government, and gives assurance that, at last, the country has, in fact and in name, a President!

21.

A Letter from the Postmaster

March 15, 1861

THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT will order the evacuation of Fort Sumter by next week.

At least that is the news is all over Montgomery, Alabama, where officials are striving to temper the inhabitants’ euphoria, and also all over Charleston, where they are not. “Sumter is to be ours without a fight!” cried a jubilant Charleston Mercury. “To those who have troubled themselves with vague fears of war on a large scale . . . the relief will be as great as the apprehensions have been grievous.”

The report came first from Texas Senator Louis Wigfall, who is still clinging to his office despite efforts this week to unseat him (an all but pointless exercise, since he will almost certainly resign next week when Texas officially recognizes the results of a referendum approving secession). Taking time out from drinking sprees with Robert Ward Johnson, who until his resignation on inauguration eve had been a senator from Kentucky (reportedly, after their first bibulous encounter last week, Johnson remembered slapping Wigfall and expressed his regrets, adding that he would understand if Wigfall felt obliged to seek satisfaction on the field of honor; Wigfall, professing no memory of the incident, magnanimously forgave Johnson and invited him to go for a drink), Wigfall wired both President Davis and General G.T. Beauregard, the newly appointed commander of the armed forces in Charleston.

His news: Sumter is out of supplies and Washington will yield the fort in five days, although Beauregard should keep his guard up in case this is a ploy to help rescue Sumter.

Such vigilance seemed even less necessary after Wigfall’s news was also reported by John Forsyth. He was one of the three commissioners who had been sent to Washington by Davis in a fruitless quest to negotiate the purchase of Sumter and other federal properties lying within the new Confederacy. Lincoln has refused to meet the commissioners in any capacity, even privately, but they were able to meet with a government official, who in turn spoke with a Cabinet official, who confirmed that an evacuation order was nigh.

And if these private communiqués were not convincing enough, they were further legitimated by reports in Northern newspapers. “There is but little doubt that the Government will order the evacuation of Fort Sumpter,” reported The New York Times—which, disregarding the preferences of the man for whom the stronghold was named (General Thomas Sumter, the Carolina gamecock who plagued Lord Cornwallis), uses the same idiosyncratic spelling that President Lincoln uses.

The identity of the Cabinet official who conveyed the information to Forsyth has not been learned, but the commissioners have informed Montgomery that they have had conferences at the highest level, including an unofficial meeting with Secretary of State Seward last week. Nor is it known whether the source of Mr. Forsyth’s information is different than the source of Senator Wigfall’s, or of the newspaper’s. But in some ways, it doesn’t matter. Though there is disagreement about the political value of holding Sumter in the face of this challenge from the South, the word from throughout the government, including the War Department and the Treasury, is that the preponderant opinion of the experts deems reinforcement neither practically possible nor militarily desirable.

One of the few who does not seem entirely convinced, however, is Abraham Lincoln. The president seems to have slow-baked a strategy while awaiting the official start of his administration, and it is weighted heavily against overreaction. “There is really no crisis except an artificial one,” he said last month, and that has been fomented by “turbulent men, aided by designing politicians. My advice, then, is to keep cool.”

And cool he remained in his inaugural address: “The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. . . . The government will not assail you.”

It is, in other words, a strategy of sitting tight. But from the moment the president learned from Major Anderson that Fort Sumter would be out of supplies in a month’s time, his carefully considered strategy was defunct; either he would have to yield on the pledge to “hold, occupy, and possess,” or he would have to yield on the pledge not to invade—which is how Confederate authorities would define any reinforcement or resupply. Lincoln cannot sit tight; he has to make a move.

In his letter, Major Anderson asserted that because of the batteries and fortifications that had been erected all around Charleston Harbor, it would take 20,000 men to effect a reinforcement of Sumter. Twenty million would be no less a fantasy number, since there are fewer than 20,000 men in the entire Army, the vast majority of whom are stationed on the western frontier. Lincoln asked General Scott for his view of the matter, and Scott agreed with Anderson. An invasion force would be needed to suppress the shore batteries, which would otherwise demolish the relief vessels, and a lengthy siege would likely ensue.

Passing his response through Seward—the two veterans of Washington policy-making have seemingly combined their wisdom to help steer the neophyte president—Scott told Lincoln that this was President Buchanan’s fault, that the government had missed its best opportunity to reinforce Sumter right after Anderson took possession of it.

Now, alas, the president’s options are limited to four: first, adopt a compromise like the one suggested by Senator Crittenden in order to hold the border states, and wait to see if the disunion fire burns itself out; second, collect customs duties offshore and blockade Southern ports in hopes of slowly bringing the rebels to heel; third, invade the South with an army and defeat them on the field of battle; or fourth, said Scott, “Say to the seceded States, go ye wayward sisters, depart in peace.”

After receiving this analysis, Lincoln, whose military experience consists of twelve weeks of service in 1832 as a volunteer who never saw battle in the Black Hawk War (“I had a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes,” he has said), politely asked the hero of Chapultepec, a man who has spent more than half a century in uniform, to please consider the problem again.

When next he met with the president at a meeting with the Cabinet three days later, the seventy-year-old Scott brought along seventy-three-year-old General Joseph Totten, the Army’s chief engineer. The Cabinet was disturbed to hear their gloomy assessment, especially Gideon Welles, the secretary of the Navy, who believed a relief mission was still feasible—mostly on the word of his chief adviser, the sixty-three-year-old Commodore Silas Stringham, another monument whose fifty-two years of service to the Navy began as a midshipman at age eleven.

Stringham believed reinforcing Sumter could be done, and had in fact approved two relief plans back in January, one fashioned by a naval commander named James Ward, the other by a former lieutenant named Gustavus Fox. (The difference in the assessments between Army and Navy comes down to whether one has more confidence in the ability of shore batteries to sink ships or the ability of ships to evade shore batteries.) Seward, with customary wiliness, suggested a clever way to split the difference: Relieve Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay in Florida, which, like Sumter, is occupied by federal troops in defiance of state authorities, but which, unlike Sumter, lies farther from land and thus can be reinforced by sea with comparative ease. That way, said Seward, the principle of federal authority is established and Sumter could still be honorably relinquished, which would help the efforts to hold on to the border states.

Perhaps the Cabinet member most distressed by the news of Sumter’s vulnerability was the postmaster general, Montgomery Blair. An ardent Union man and a West Point graduate, Blair was one of the attorneys who represented Dred Scott. His influence is amplified by his connection to his father, Francis, the editor of the Washington Globe, a member of Andrew Jackson’s kitchen cabinet and a founder of the Republican Party. The next day, after hearing his son express his dismay about the possibility of losing Sumter, Francis left his breakfast table and hied over to the White House, where he bucked the lengthy line of office seekers and all but demanded to see the president. The surrender of Sumter would be the surrender of the Union, Frank Blair said in a fury, and passionately argued against yielding. The old man acted impertinently, but the president was impressed.

Later, when Frank Blair cooled down, he asked his son to convey his apologies to Lincoln. But Monty had something more persuasive in mind, and had summoned his brother-in-law to Washington. The brother-in-law, as it happens, is Gustavus Fox, the same former lieutenant who had formulated a plan to relieve Sumter. And on the very next day, Fox was sitting with the president explaining an ingenious plan involving a couple of tugboats and a steamer.

The president was sufficiently impressed that he asked Fox to present his plan to the Cabinet. Afterward, Lincoln asked each member of the Cabinet to put in writing his views on reinforcing Sumter. Caleb Smith of Interior said, “It would not be wise.” Gideon Welles of the Navy argued, “Failure would be attended with untold disaster.” Simon Cameron of the War Department said that surrendering the fort later would still be “an inevitable necessity.” Bates, the attorney general, discouraged “any act which may have the semblance . . . of beginning a civil war.” Salmon P. Chase of Treasury equivocally advised against it, and said the administration instead ought to consider “the organization of actual government by the seven seceded states as an accomplished revolution.” And Seward predicted that the maneuver would propel the remaining slave states straight into the Confederacy. “I would not initiate a war to regain a useless position on the soil of the seceded States. I would not provoke a war in any way now.”

No doubt it was the near unanimity of the Cabinet’s opinions that fed those reports that caused such jubilation in Confederate hearts, for only the postmaster general took a hard line in favor of reinforcement. “Every new conquest made by the rebels strengthens their hands at home and their claim to recognition as an independent people abroad,” wrote Montgomery Blair. “The rebellion was checked in 1833 by the promptitude of the President in taking measures which made it manifest that it could not be attempted with impunity, and [the current rebellion] has grown to its present formidable proportions only because similar measures were not taken. The action of the President in 1833 inspired respect whilst in 1860 the rebels were encouraged by the contempt they felt for the incumbent of the Presidency. But it was not alone upon Mr. Buchanan’s weakness the rebels relied for success. They for the most part believe that the Northern men are deficient in the courage necessary to maintain the Government. . . . No men or people have so many difficulties as those whose firmness is doubted.”

The president has taken these letters under advisement.

Verbatim

No Surrender

From an editorial in Milwaukee Daily Wisconsin, March 15, 1861

Will the rebels fire the first gun has become the question, whether we are to have peace or war. We are aware that there are serious practical difficulties that must attend the reinforcement of Fort Sumter. The battery on Morris Island is a natural strong sand battery, and no vessel can pass to Fort Sumter without passing [it]. If the South Carolinians fire first, of course our vessels will reply, and that battery must be silenced before reinforcements can be placed in Fort Sumter. . . .

Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that the administration feels the gravity of their determination—for it is now quite certain that the question must soon be determined. Of course, if Lieut. Gen. Scott advises its surrender, it is possible that it may be ordered by the administration. . . . But we confess that we cannot believe that Lieut. Gen. Scott will advise any such surrender. We shall not believe it until we see his signature appended to the order. Even with that approval it is hardly probable that the people of the Free States would sanction the measure. They have been expecting to see a firm government under Mr. Lincoln’s administration.

Slavery: A Great Christian Enterprise

From an editorial in Washington States and Union (Washington, D.C.), March 21, 1861

Excepting those who are drawn to the South in the capacity of traveling mercantile agents, and a class of Abolition lecturers, preachers, and tract distributors, no Northern man is ever seen in the South. It is, therefore, impossible that a correct knowledge of the institution of slavery can be claimed by those citizens North and West who have so violently opposed the system, denounced the slave-owners with degrading epithets, and driven them to the foolish act of secession.

In corroboration of the fact that there is a bright side to the institution, and one which should rejoice the heart of the Christian, and cause anti-slavery fanaticism forever to abate its heartless epithets against slave owners, the following statistics, from a reliable source, will have their weight. The negro slaves connected with the different churches is 465,000, viz: Methodist, 215,000; Baptist, 157,000; Presbyterian, 38,000; Episcopal, 7,000; Campbellites, 10,000; other sects, 38,000. It is a safe calculation, adds the same authority, (Georgia Educational Journal,) to say that for every colored member three other negroes attend church. In the extreme Southern States, where owners and overseers requires their negroes to attend church, the proportion is larger. These 465,000 multiplied by three, gives 1,395,000 slaves in attendance on Divine Service in the South every Sabbath.

There is food for reflection in these facts. England and the United States engaged in one of the greatest Christian enterprises the world has ever known, when they embarked in Christian missions. In that work vast sums of money have been expended, and many valuable lives have been sacrificed. Yet their labors have been blessed to the conversion of 200,000 souls. . . . These men came originally from among the degraded tribes of Africa, where the climate almost forbids our missionaries to venture; they have been elevated from abject ignorance to a knowledge and belief in the Saviour; some of them are now returning to the shores of Africa, where they have established the Republic of Liberia, introduced good government, schools, churches, seminaries, manufactories, agriculture, &c., and are prospering and disseminating the great principles of civilization and Christianity. Do we not see a providence in these things? Is it right, then, for our Republican neighbors to destroy the Union over an institution that can show so glorious results in the progress of civilization?

No Future for Southern Democracy

From the diary of George Templeton Strong, March 20, 1861

In the Slave-owning Confederacy, it becomes plainer every day that secession is the act of an oligarchy, and ignores or contradicts and overrides the “self-evident truths” of all the Democratic platforms over the last half century. The non-slaveholders and poor whites, who do the hurrahing and the lynching, are blindly assisting at their own political annihilation. Lord Davis (they have baptized a recently launched war-scow or canoe the “Lady Davis” in honor of Mrs. Jefferson Davis) means to rule his people. That prince and his chivalric pals have no notion of submitting constitutions to a popular vote. Not they. Alabama and Mississippi newspapers begin to recalcitrate a little, but it will be in vain. Democratic theories of universal suffrage and the Rights of the People stand no chance against resolute men who have attained power and mean to keep it in times of revolutionary excitement. If the Southern Confederates hold together long enough to take definite political form, their government will be that of a strong, unscrupulous aristocracy. Malcontents will be promptly silenced or hanged, and even the sacred fundamental constitutional right of secession will not be exercised without serious danger and embarrassment.

22.

Holding Actions

March 23, 1861

FACED WITH UNPALATABLE RECOMMENDATIONS from his civilian and military advisers alike, but braced by the stirring advocacy of Blairs pere et fils, and intrigued by the can-do spirit of the relatively young Gustavus Fox, Abraham Lincoln this week . . . stalled for time.

The more the president pondered, the more he wanted to know. What is the real supply situation in Fort Sumter? How formidable are the armaments arrayed against the fort? Despite Charleston’s fervor for secession, is there a residual feeling for the Union that can be quickened to life? Sumter may be more easily resupplied than his superannuated advisers believe, and yet Lincoln may conclude that an accommodationist posture might serve him better in the long run. Paris was worth a mass, Henry of Navarre trenchantly concluded; Virginia may well be worth a fort.

Just a few days before his inauguration, in a meeting with delegates to the Virginia Secession Commission, Lincoln broached the possibility of yielding Sumter in exchange for Virginia’s pledge to remain in the Union. Lincoln fairly blurted the idea in a way that almost seemed not serious. But more and more, Virginia seems to hold the key to the controversy. If she stays, the seceded states are a breakaway republic that faces long odds of success. But if she leaves, other states will accompany her, and suddenly the Confederacy will become a going concern with a government that might win diplomatic recognition from the powers of Europe.

If you can believe Thurlow Weed, President Lincoln has three times in recent days returned to the idea of yielding Sumter in order to strengthen the hand of Virginia’s Unionists. The risks are high: If he relieves Sumter and Virginia secedes, he has erred; if he cedes Sumter and Virginia goes anyway, he has erred even more egregiously.

Craving more information, Lincoln separately sent three emissaries to Charleston this week to learn more. So far only one has returned. Last week, Fox was a soft-bellied, walrus-mustachioed manager of a Massachusetts textile mill whose wife called him Fatty. This week, he is a knowledgeable ex-naval officer who has become the personal envoy of the President of the United States. But after visiting Fort Sumter, he reports a situation bleaker than had been assessed.

Outside the fort, a vigorous General Beauregard is applying all the principles of engineering he studied at West Point and all the experience in ordnance and fortification he developed in the ensuing two decades to sharpen the effectiveness of the forces that have turned out against Sumter. In just two weeks, the handsome, impassive Louisianan, a man whose every gesture suggests the hauteur of Napoleon’s great marshals, has requisitioned slaves to build up the coastal defenses and redeployed the cannon targeting the fort. “Evacuation Day”—the day last week the federal government was supposed to have abandoned Sumter—came and went, leaving the rebels in a generally churlish disposition, more frustrated and if possible even angrier than before.

Inside the fort, Fox found the situation even less tenable than reported in Anderson’s letter. The garrison was exhausted from ten weeks of ceaseless vigilance against an ever-looming threat, complicated by constant isolation and monotony. Major Anderson seemed taut and snappish, and Fox observed that relations between him and his officers were cool and tense. Anderson told Fox to tell the president that his provisions were dwindling. He would put the men on half rations, which meant that he could feed them until April 15. Fox explained the relief mission he had designed, but Anderson dismissed its potential for success.

Fox, however, was not dissuaded, and when well after nightfall a boat came to return him to the mainland, Fox noted that even though the small vessel was close enough for him to hear the creaking of the oars, he could not see the thing until had all but reached Sumter’s small pier. How much harder would it be for Charleston’s cannoneers to fire accurately from 1,300 yards away?

Anderson was not much impressed. He knew that troops at Fort Moultrie had trained a dozen batteries on that very pier, and he didn’t think it would much matter whether the gunners could actually see the boat or not. But Fox emphasized his optimism in his report. Now Lincoln awaits the return of Messrs. Stephen Hurlbut and Ward Hill Lamon, both sent to gauge vestigial loyalty among South Carolinians.

Meanwhile, in all quarters of the land, brushfires of the rebellion continued to spark. Some fizzled and some burned. In the faraway southwest, a portion of the New Mexico Territory south of the thirty-fourth parallel broke away, named itself the Arizona Territory, and declared its allegiance to the Confederacy. In Missouri, on the other hand, a state convention rebuffed Governor Claiborne Jackson’s effort to lead the state out of the Union and into the Confederacy.

In Montgomery, President Davis appointed the fiery secessionist William L. Yancey of Alabama as minister to Great Britain, entrusting him to plead the cotton kingdom’s cause in the capital of the textile industry. Almost in response, President Lincoln named the reserved and proper Charles Francis Adams—congressman, son of a president and diplomat, grandson of a president and diplomat—to represent the United States in the same dominion.

In Texas, Sam Houston—governor of the state, hero of San Jacinto, Father of Texan Independence—sat whittling in the basement of the state capital as the Secession Convention, which Houston vociferously opposed, met in session in the chambers above. Three times the chairman of the convention summoned Houston to appear and swear an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy—“Sam Houston! . . . Sam Houston! . . . Sam Houston!”—but the old lion whittled on, and eventually the convention declared his office vacant and named a replacement who was compliant to its demands.

And in the new Confederacy, the Constitutional Convention in Montgomery adjourned, its delegates returning to their home states to campaign for the ratification of what they profess is a familiar but significantly improved Constitution.

Among those hitting the stump in Georgia was Vice President Alexander Stephens. Just two months ago, the one-time congressman had stood at the Georgia Secession Convention in the state capital in Milledgeville, a giant intellect inside an emaciated body, and railed against disunion. “Who but this Convention shall be held responsible for it?” was his question on January 17. Now, overtaken by events—and unexpectedly elevated by them—Stephens appeared last week in Savannah, Georgia, where he argued on behalf of the legitimacy and future prospects of the Confederate States of America.

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution of African slavery as it exists amongst us, and the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the ‘rock upon which the old Union would split.’ He was right. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him . . . were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the ’storm came and the wind blew.’

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. . . . Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. . . . I have been asked, what of the future? It has been apprehended by some that we would have arrayed against us the civilized world. I care not who or how many they may be against us; when we stand upon the eternal principles of truth, if we are true to ourselves and the principles for which we contend, we must triumph.”

In Montgomery, President Davis was slightly vexed to hear of his vice president’s speech, though less by its content than its timing. Like his presidential counterpart in Washington, Davis believes more and more that Virginia seems to hold the key to the controversy. If she stays, the seceded states face long odds of success; but were she to join, then suddenly the Confederacy would have a legitimacy that Great Britain would have to recognize. But though Virginia may be a slave state, there is plenty of anti-planter sentiment among the yeoman farmers and mechanics, and secession seems no better than an even-money proposition. The Confederacy’s fundamental tie to slavery may not be exactly the right message to emphasize at this moment to Virginia or, for that matter, to anti-slavery Britain. But it’s water over the dam: Little Aleck was triumphant in Savannah, and the constitution was approved.

Verbatim

Old Abe, the Orang-Outang

From an editorial in the Richmond Examiner (Virginia), March 19, 1861

Once upon a time, when it was the custom of the beasts and birds of the United States of North America to elect a king to reign over them, once in every four years, it so happened that an ugly and ferocious old Orang-Outang from the wilds of Illinois, who was known by the name of Old Abe, was chosen king. This election created a great disturbance and a revolution in the Southern States, for the beasts in that part of the country had imported from Africa a large number of black monkeys and had made slaves of them; and Old Abe had declared that this was an indignity offered to his family, that monkey slavery was the sum of all villainies, and that he would not allow it to be perpetuated on any account, and that when he became king he intended to abolish monkey slavery throughout all his dominions.

Blood Will Tell

From an editorial in the Detroit Daily Advertiser (Michigan), April 4, 1861

Until Texas was admitted into the Union, it was considered the Botany Bay of America—the chief difference between the former and the British penal colony being, that one was the compulsory, and the other the voluntary resort of criminals. Every horse thief, murderer, gambler, robber, and other rogue of high and low degree, fled to Texas when he found the United States too hot longer to hold him. The pioneers of that State were cut-throats of one kind or another, with some honorable exceptions. Those of them who have escaped hanging or the State prison, and their descendants, are the men who have led the secession movement in that State. It is not strange that, with such antecedents, they should turn out traitors when all other crimes had been exhausted.

23.

The Choice Is Charybdis

March 29, 1861

IN PUBLIC APPEARANCES earlier this week, President Lincoln impressed visitors with his assuredness and easy social grace. When, for example, he received the credentials of the Chevalier Giuseppi Bertinatti, the new minister from the kingdom of Italy, the president maintained a wry smile, as though recognizing the comical contrast between the suavity of the chevalier’s bows and blue-and-silver-laced uniform, and his own lurching backwoods dips and wrinkled courthouse suit. Later, at the first state dinner of his administration, although he was accompanied by his understandably anxious, furiously fanning First Lady, and scrutinized by a still-skeptical Cabinet who smiled through the aftertaste of the insults they had been spitting at one another all week, the president displayed his famous joviality and good humor, availing himself of a seemingly bottomless cache of anecdotes and jokes.

Perhaps visitors ought to have been impressed with his acting ability instead, for no one on hand who was not privy to the workings of the president’s mind could have surmised that at that moment, Lincoln could see that his policy was collapsing, and that he was being pushed into a choice between a modern Scylla and Charybdis, between one action that invited ruin (evacuating Fort Sumter) and another that threatened catastrophe (reinforcing it).

In recent days Lincoln had been leaning toward evacuation, believing that the impending ruin—the loss of authority and credibility he might suffer by appearing to cave in to the rebellious confederates—would be mitigated by the benefits of immediate peace and the mollification of the border states. This has long been the strategy of Secretary Seward: Let the rebellious states go, avoid actions that would alienate the all-important upper South, and stand with arms outstretched, ready to warmly embrace these prodigal children when they discover the big world is too confusing (and too costly, and too contentious) to be alone in after dark. Soon enough they will have problems, and soon enough the loyal Unionists who are now quietly going about their business will assert their complaints, and a campaign for reunification will begin. It is to this view that Lincoln has been gradually warming himself while awaiting the reports of the three personal emissaries he had sent to Charleston in an effort to obtain fresh, reliable, firsthand information.

They are all back now, and none brought good news. Late last week, the first of them, Gustavus Fox, brought the discouraging news that the situation at Fort Sumter was worse that had been reported: Supplies were low, morale was lower, and the armaments facing the fort were more formidable than had been advertised. This was not good news, but at least it seemed to dictate that capitulation was not a choice but a necessity.

A couple of days later, the second emissary, Stephen Hurlbut, a Charleston native who had become friends with Lincoln after moving to Illinois, returned with his findings about any residual ardor for the Union among Carolinians. There is none, Hurlbut reported. “I have no hesitation in reporting as unquestionable,” he wrote to Lincoln, “that Separate Nationality is a fixed fact—that there is an unanimity of sentiment which is to my mind astonishing—that there is no attachment to the Union, that almost every one of those very men who in 1832 . . . were in fact ready to draw the sword in civil war for the Nation, are now as ready to take arms if necessary for the Southern Confederacy.”

Lest the president harbor any illusions, Hurlbut was firm. “There is positively nothing to appeal to,” he said. “The Sentiment of National Patriotism, always feeble in Carolina, has been Extinguished. . . . Merchants and businessmen act upon the belief that great growth of trade and expansion of material prosperity will follow the Establishment of a Southern Republic. They expect a golden era, when Charleston shall be a great commercial emporium, and control the South as New York does the North.” And as though to pound a final nail into the coffin, Hurlbut made clear that patience with the federal military presence in Sumter is nearly gone. South Carolina would not tolerate a relief attempt. “I have no doubt that a ship known to contain only provisions for Sumter would be stopped,” said Hurlbut. The garrison can still be safely withdrawn, he reported, but he doesn’t think this is likely to be the case in a week.

Hurlbut said that he managed to find one staunch Unionist still in Charleston, Mr. James Petigru, the seventy-one-year-old former South Carolina attorney general who opposed John Calhoun and the nullificationists in the 1830s, who opposed Magrath and Gourdin and Gist and the other disunionists last November, and who stands by the Stars and Stripes even now. The secessionists tolerate him, partially out of respect for his intelligence and integrity and age, and partially in appreciation of his stinging wit. After all, it was Petigru who, after South Carolina voted to secede last December, famously quipped, “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” Alas, this time Petigru offered no bon mots, just the sad news that he is the last Union man in Charleston.

Shortly after Hurlbut’s return, Lincoln’s third personal emissary, his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, having conducted his peregrinations in Charleston’s byways and back alleys, returned to Washington and seconded Hurlbut’s conclusion: “This is a time to expect and be prepared for the worst.”

The news fell heavily on Lincoln. All during the long interregnum between his election and inauguration, he held the belief that there was latent support for the Union among Southerners that somehow Buchanan had failed to reach but that he, Lincoln, a backwoods boy, a native Kentuckian, would surely be able to tap. We are not enemies, but friends, he had stressed at his inauguration. But if South Carolina is beyond reach, then it is essential that she and the other ultras be isolated. As painful as it may be, relinquishing Sumter might just be the gesture of conciliation that would keep the border states in the pen. Exchange Sumter for Virginia, as the president thinks of it.

At a meeting held just before the start of the state dinner, the possibility of this swap becoming reality was bluntly debunked by General Scott. Surrendering Sumter won’t be enough, Scott told the president. We won’t be able to hold onto the eight remaining slaveholding states just by giving up Sumter. We’ll have to evacuate Fort Pickens in Pensacola, too. Only by such a gesture can we soothe and give confidence to the eight remaining slaveholding states. We can continue to display our resolve by holding on to Fort Taylor in Key West and Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas.

The news struck Lincoln with a cold shock, as he put it to friends, as powerful as the one he felt when he learned of Major Anderson’s vulnerability just after the inauguration. For one thing, Fort Pickens was not as vulnerable as Fort Sumter and was amply provisioned, and in fact, he had ordered 200 more men into the fort just three weeks ago. Scott had never wanted to relieve Sumter and had consistently advocated letting it go. But there was no military necessity to abandon Pickens, and Scott was clearly exceeding his authority as a military advisor in venturing a view on what was strictly a political question. As Lincoln knew, Scott often worked in tandem with Seward; was this some further manipulation by the famously clever secretary of state? But just taken at face value, the news was stunning. Even if giving up Pickens would win him the border states, it would lose him Charles Sumner, Zachariah Chandler, Ben Wade, and most of the rest of the Republican Party. And if giving up Sumter wasn’t going to get him Virginia, then what was the point of giving up Sumter?

What conversation subsequently passed between Lincoln and Scott is not known, but the general, who came dressed for dinner and who has not missed a meal since the Monroe administration, did not join the guests. Later he excused his absence by complaining of the sudden onset of a bout of old soldier’s disease, to which he is known to be prone, and Lincoln was surely a jovial host during the meal. Perhaps all was cordial between the two. But as dinner drew to a close, the president collected his Cabinet into a closed session in the Red Room, where Lincoln, described by one participant as looking “agitated,” relayed Scott’s recommendation. A long, grim silence ensued until Montgomery Blair sharply dismissed Scott for “playing the part of a politician.” It would not have been lost on anyone in that room that the real target of that remark was Seward.

The advisors went home and reconvened the next day at noon. They found a haggard-looking president who obviously had not slept. Reviewing what he had learned from Fox, Hurlbut, Lamon, and Scott, Lincoln asked the Cabinet to discuss several options: Fox’s plan for reinforcement, Scott’s plan for leaving Pickens and Sumter, and a new variation that split the difference, which was resupplying Sumter with food alone. At some point Lincoln asked his advisors to repeat the exercise they had undertaken two weeks before and put their views in writing.

Two weeks ago, six members favored the evacuation of Sumter, with only Blair in favor of making a stand. Now, with one member absent, four favored reinforcing Sumter and only two were inclined to give it up. “I do not think it wise to provoke a Civil War beginning in Charleston and in rescue of an untenable position,” Seward insisted. Instead, he advised mounting an expedition to retake Pensacola or Texas.

The meeting broke up without reaching a decision, and Seward went home, no doubt sensing that the argument had changed and that he would have to recalibrate his strategy. The Cabinet was tilting toward action; if he could get them to back a move against Pensacola or Texas, weeks if not months might pass before the forces and supplies were organized, giving people a chance to simmer down, giving him time to negotiate a settlement. Why, a statement of strong intentions by the president might prove very useful to Seward as he works on a deal. Better to negotiate with me, he could tell the Confederates, because Lincoln is hell-bent on war.

In the evening, Seward was visited by George Harrington, the assistant secretary of the Treasury, who had just been at the White House, where he had seen Lincoln meeting with Blair, Fox, and Navy Secretary Welles. The president has made up his mind, Harrington said. He has decided to reinforce Fort Sumter. Fox has been ordered to prepare ships.

“Thunder, George!” Seward exclaimed. “What are you talking about? We are not yet in a position to go to war!” He would have to take this up with the president.

But not right away. All the next day Lincoln’s head pounded with a migraine headache. Finally, in the afternoon he “keeled over,” as his wife put it, and had to be put to bed.

Verbatim

Buchanan Again?

From an editorial in the Cincinnati Daily Times (Ohio), April 3, 1861

Mr. Lincoln is stepping directly into the footsteps of his predecessor. The same supineness, cowardice, imbecility, or whatever else it may be termed, which marked and damned the Administration of Buchanan is the main characteristic of the Republican Administration so far. It assures Commissioners from the Southern Confederacy that the Government will make no movement to defend itself; it surrenders forts; it refuses to assert its authority in the treason-infected States, or to enforce the laws. For this same thing James Buchanan retired from the White House covered with the curses and execrations of the country. Is not the Lincoln Administration deserving of the same fate? . . .

There must be a fundamental change in the policy of the Administration, or like Buchanan’s, it will soon be without a party. The press may apologize, and the orators excuse, but all combined cannot make the people endorse an Administration which will not defend and protect the Government.

Does Cotton Justify Slavery?

From an editorial in the Wabash Plain Dealer (Indiana), April 5, 1861

It will be urged that the hot, sultry climate of the South forbids white labor, and that black labor will not exist except by compulsion. Let us admit this with reference to a narrow strip of country running across the extreme South—Mississippi, Alabama, and those extreme Southern States. The proposition is, that society in the Cotton States cannot exist without the cultivation of cotton, and that cotton cannot be cultivated without slave labor. Suppose this all be true. Does it justify human bondage? Is the liberty of innocent human beings to be balanced in the scale with bales of cotton? We, of the boasted European caste, are accustomed, in the toasts and orations of our Fourth of July celebrations, to prize our liberty next to honor and life. Is this merely declamatory extravagance, or is it truth; and if truth, is it not so as applied to all races of men? Or, is the Caucasian face the passport to political freedom—the royal stamp which distinguishes the freeman from the bondman? The regaining of our liberties justifies the spilling of human blood, excuses the terrors of revolution and the crash of empires. But the liberty of the African must be measured by the loss of a single paltry product of the earth! Stating the position is sufficient to refute it.

April 1861

24.

Chaos and Confusion

April 5, 1861

IT WAS Take Your Pick Week in Washington.

Do you want your Army run by a general or a captain? Do you want your Navy run by the Secretary of the Navy or a Navy lieutenant or an Army captain or a private businessman? Do you want your government’s policies to be set the president or by a rival he defeated? Do not trouble yourself excessively for an answer, because these are trick questions: At one time or another this week, all were true.

At the week’s beginning, President Lincoln ordered the implementation of the plan for a relief expedition to Fort Sumter that had been devised by Gustavus Fox, a politically connected mill owner from Massachusetts who had once been a naval officer and who had recently impressed the president with his intellect and demeanor. For all its virtues, confusion was woven into the fabric of the plan from the start. The mission called for a convoy of civilian vessels that would carry supplies and a thousand troops, and armed military vessels that would protect them. The civilian Fox could not command the military vessels, but Commodore Stringham, who as the Navy’s senior officer was the logical choice to take over the expedition, declined the job because Fox had scouted the harbor and made the plan. Another officer would have to be named, but because time was fleeting, Fox left for the Brooklyn Navy Yard to begin assembling civilian ships and provisions. Meanwhile, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles ordered the revenue-cutter Harriet Lane in Brooklyn and the steamers Pawnee in Washington and Pocahontas in Norfolk to prepare to join the expedition no later than April. The next day, Welles telegraphed Brooklyn and ordered the steamer Powhatan to be readied as well.

But a mission being readied is far from a mission under way, which meant that William Seward still had time to save the administration from what he felt would be a catastrophic intervention. The secretary of state always believed the federal government could lose nothing by waiting. The fragile secession bubble would soon pop, crushed by small irritants such as fixing roads and filling positions and collecting taxes. The South would come back soon—assuming the North didn’t make it too hard for the rebels, once they stopped hooting and hollering, to swallow their pride.

And what would fighting at Fort Sumter be about but pride? It has no military necessity to the North. The Army doesn’t believe it can relieve it, and their effort to reinforce it in January failed. The Army’s presence there is a bone in the prideful Confederacy’s throat that they will surely act to remove, and once they do so, the fight will escalate. If the North is bent on asserting itself, why not do so somewhere like Florida or Texas, where it can win more easily, make its point more cheaply, and leave open the door to reconciliation?

Seward thought he might have a way to open the president’s mind in the person of Montgomery Meigs, a charismatic Army captain who had made a name for himself building the Rock Creek Aqueduct and overseeing the construction of the Capitol, and perhaps even more importantly, by openly feuding with his former boss, the treasonous ex-Secretary of War John Floyd, and publicly calling for the impeachment of President Buchanan. Seward, sensing that perhaps the president had grown tired of recalcitrant museum pieces such as Scott and Totten, thought Lincoln might like to hear from an officer “who could still get on a horse in the field.”

Seward and Meigs met with Lincoln and presented a plan for relieving Fort Pickens in Pensacola Harbor. Lincoln was interested, and asked if Meigs could command an expedition that would not only secure Fort Pickens, but also Forts Jefferson and Taylor in the Florida Keys. Certainly, said Meigs, who nonetheless felt obliged to point out that as a mere captain, he would not be able to command the majors who were in charge of the forts. “You must be promoted,” said Seward, pretending not to know that the military might be somewhat jealous of its prerogatives in this realm. When Prime Minister William Pitt wanted to conquer Quebec, Seward noted, he elevated Colonel James Wolfe over a number of generals.

Seward left the White House and went to visit General Scott, where he indicated the high likelihood that the president was going to order the relief of Fort Pickens instead of Fort Sumter. Very well, Scott replied, and then met with his aide Erasmus Keyes, who spent half an hour producing maps and charts and explaining the general futility of sending heavy guns and carriages onto the sandy beaches of Fort Pickens. This was not going to be a quick and easy operation. “Go see Seward and tell him just what you told me,” a discouraged Scott replied.

But Seward wasn’t swayed by Keyes’ objections; he simply didn’t care. Find Captain Meigs, he ordered, make a plan to relieve Pickens, and then go brief Scott, and then go to the White House and brief President Lincoln.

Which Keyes and Meigs almost did, except that by the time they were finished making their plans, they didn’t have time to see Scott. Instead, Meigs and Keyes presented their plan to Lincoln and Seward. Very well, said Lincoln, go see Scott and tell him I said go ahead. So ended Easter Sunday, with Seward having a plan he wanted but also a plan he didn’t, and Scott having to participate in two plans, neither of which he believed in or had helped draw up.

Lincoln, Seward, and Meigs met again the next day. This time Seward brought along not only Meigs, but the forty-seven-year-old Navy Lieutenant David Porter, who had a reputation for being dashing, energetic, and “given to intrigues.” Porter suggested dispatching a steamer to screen Pickens from Confederate batteries while the reinforcements landed. Lincoln liked this idea, and sent Meigs and Porter into an adjacent room to draft the orders needed to put the plan into effect. Working from Welles’ first list, which showed that the Pocahontas, Pawnee, and Harriet Lane had already been assigned, Porter requisitioned the Powhatan for the Pickens expedition. He then relieved its current captain and named himself in his place. Meanwhile, Meigs of the Army wrote orders naming Stringham of the Navy to command the operation, and elevating Commodore Samuel Barron, a friend of Porter’s, to replace Stringham as the head of the Office of Detail, the Navy’s personnel department. Lincoln signed each of these orders, and Seward, to round out the exercise in extemporaneous command, transferred $10,000 in State Department funds to the Navy to outfit the expedition.

“What will Uncle Gideon say?” asked the president.

“I will make it right with Mr. Welles,” Seward assured him.

But he didn’t, and when Welles received copies of some of the orders, he rushed to the White House and barged in on Lincoln. “What have I done wrong?” asked Lincoln, obviously sensing his culpability.

His head shaking under his famously cheap wig, Welles explained that he had put Stringham in charge of the Office of Detail because Stringham is a trustworthy Union man and that office makes all assignments. Barron is pro-secession and says he is friends with Jefferson Davis. Acknowledging Welles’ superior judgment, Lincoln rescinded the order, and a relieved Welles departed. Two days later, his agitation returned, having only then discovered that the Powhatan still had two different captains with two different missions.

Meanwhile, self-promotion on a grander scale than Porter’s was being attempted by the secretary of state. A pre-emption had long seemed a possibility; Seward has never really gotten over the shock he felt at losing the Republican presidential nomination to a rival he considers his inferior. On those occasions before the inauguration when Seward’s self-regard overflowed its banks—in wanting to meet as an equal with Lincoln and Hamlin in Chicago last fall, in his coy indecisiveness about accepting a Cabinet post—Lincoln gently but firmly turned it away. But since taking office, Seward has routinely exceeded his brief: alienating other Cabinet officers; discussing administration policy with Confederate representatives without authorization; and now usurping other Cabinet officers in developing policy.

On Monday he finally went too far and presented Lincoln with a memo he had written entitled “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration.” Beginning with the bold assertion that “we are at the end of a month’s administration, and yet without a policy domestic or foreign,” Seward reiterated his pro-Pickens, anti-Sumter plan. Then, based on reports that Spain had annexed Santo Domingo and that France was preparing to take Haiti, Seward suggested that the administration deflect attention from the internal conflict by demanding that France and Spain explain their meddlesome behavior, and that Great Britain, Canada, and Russia also explain why they have threatened to interfere in our domestic crisis. Seward had long thought that a foreign war would cure secession fever, and he would be happy to start one.

But Seward saved his greatest effrontery for his close. “Whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it. . . . Either the president must do it himself, or devolve it on some member of his cabinet. . . . I seek neither to evade nor avoid responsibility.” If you don’t want to be president, I’ll do it.

For whatever reason—perhaps Lincoln truly values Seward’s talents beyond his foibles, or perhaps he has concluded that a new president cannot lose his most accomplished adviser a mere month into his government while a great crisis burns, or perhaps because he is exceptionally merciful—the president did not sack Seward. He simply made it clear that if something needs be done, he, the president, will be the one to do it.

Subject, apparently, to meeting muster with Mr. Welles.

But if this frantic to-ing and fro-ing and lofty self-regard seems comical, here, possibly, is the real joke: It might have all been unnecessary. On April 4, the delegates of the Virginia Secession Convention voted overwhelmingly against seceding. The eighty-eight to forty-five vote was a resounding rebuke to the frenetic disunonists of South Carolina and the others who joined her whirlwind of dissolution. “I ask why it is we are placed in this perilous position?” asked delegate Jubal Early. “And is it not solely from the action of these states that have seceded from the Union without having consulted our views?”

The issue is not entirely over. There is a suggestion that Virginia meet with the other seven slaveholding states that have not seceded to discuss how their needs and grievances might best be addressed, and the former governor, the militant Henry Wise, continues to agitate for secession on any pretext possible. But this is clearly a sharp rebuff to the fire-eating disunionists of the nascent Confederacy. All along, the secessionists have depended on a momentum of rebelliousness to carry their cause, with one sudden victory buoying the next. Now, in the contest for the most important state in contention, they have been slapped with an abrupt setback. If Virginia won’t go, it is impossible to see why Maryland or Kentucky or North Carolina will, which will leave the Confederacy a small slaveocracy rimming the Gulf of Mexico.

Jefferson Davis needs to do something quick. And in truth, there isn’t more than one something he can do.

Verbatim

Wanted: Kindness and Generosity to the South

From an editorial in the Dubuque Herald (Iowa), April 10, 1861

It is true the Government has been patient; it has been even lenient towards the Seceded States, but it has seemed to lack in all its relations to the disaffected States that necessary quality in all Governments which for want of a more appropriate term is designated by that of Parental. This quality it has not manifested as it should have done. Its patience and leniency lose their value because they do not appear to have been the result of that feeling for the waywardness of the Seceded States which comes from the heart.

The Government policy has been one of cruel disregard of complaints and of the consequences of the rashness, folly and crime of the disaffected Southern people, when by a kind word, a generous act, a magnanimous avowal of the error of the political dogma on which the Administration went into power, would have dispelled the illusions, if such they be, which have caused the South to array itself in hostility against the Government.

We cannot help saying that the Government has not performed its duty in the respect to which we have alluded. It has preferred to act arbitrarily as tyrannical Governments usually do. A Parental Government would have tried remedial measures, first, before resorting to the exercise of its vengeance; but the Government as Administered by Mr. Lincoln seems to know of but one course to pursue, and that is to provoke a conflict between the Government and its disaffected people, for the purpose of coercing them to obey its own behests and to submit to the infliction of intolerable grievances from a fanatical faction which have obtained control of the government.

Strike a Blow!

From a speech by Roger Pryor, former Congressman from Virginia, delivered in Charleston, South Carolina, April 10, 1861

Do not distrust Virginia. As sure as tomorrow’s sun will rise upon us, just so surely Virginia will be a member of the Southern Confederation. And I will tell you, gentlemen, what will put her in the Southern Confederation by less than an hour of the Shrewsbury Clock—Strike a Blow! The very moment that blood is shed, old Virginia will make common cause with her sisters of the South.

Reduce the Fort

From correspondence among officials of the Confederate States of America

Charleston, April 8, 1861

To Hon. L.P. Walker, Secretary of War, Montgomery:

An authorized messenger from President Lincoln has just informed Gov. Pickens and myself that provisions will be sent to Fort Sumter peaceably, or otherwise by force.

G.T. Beauregard

Montgomery, April 10, 1861

To Gen. Beauregard, Charleston:

If you have no doubt of the authorized character of the agent who communicated to you the intention of the Washington government to supply Fort Sumter by force, you will at once demand its evacuation, and if this is refused, proceed in such a manner as you may determine to reduce it.

L.P. Walker

Headquarters Fort Sumter S.C., April 11, 1861

To Brig. Gen. G.T. Beauregard, Commanding Provisional Army C.S.A.:

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication demanding the evacuation of this fort. . . . I regret that my sense of honor and of my obligation to my government prevent my compliance.

Thanking for the fair, manly and courteous terms proposed, and for the high compliment paid me, I remain, General, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

Robert Anderson

Major U.S. Army, Commanding

FORT SUMTER, S.C., April 12, 1861, 3:20 a.m.

SIR:

By authority of Brigadier-General Beauregard, commanding the Provisional Forces of the Confederate States, we have the honor to notify you that he will open the fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time. We have the honor to be very respectfully,

Your obedient servants,

JAMES CHESNUT JR., Aide-de-camp. STEPHEN D. LEE, Captain C. S. Army, Aide-de-camp.

Prayers and Imprecations

From the diary of Mary Chesnut, in Charleston, South Carolina, April 12, 1861

Anderson will not capitulate.

Yesterday was the merriest, maddest dinner we have had yet. Men were audaciously wise and witty. We had an unspoken foreboding that it was to be our last pleasant meeting. . . .

Mr. Chesnut returned—his interview with Colonel Anderson had been deeply interesting—but was not inclined to be communicative, wanted his dinner. Felt for Anderson. Had telegraphed to President David for instructions.

What answer to give Anderson, &c&c. He has gone back to Fort Sumter, with additional instructions. . . .

I do not pretend to go to sleep. How can I? If Anderson does not accept terms—at four—the orders are, he shall be fired on.

I count four—St. Michael chimes. I begin to hope. At half past four, the heavy booming of a cannon.

I sprang out of bed. And on my knees—prostrate. I pray as I never prayed before.

There was a sound of stir all over the house—pattering of feet in the corridor—all seemed to be hurrying one way. I put on my double gown and a shawl and went, too . . . to the housetop.

The shells were bursting. In the dark I heard a man say “waste of ammunition.”

I knew my husband was rowing about in a boat somewhere in the dark bay. And the shells were roofing it over—bursting toward the fort. . . . Certainly fire had begun. The regular roar of the cannon—there it was. And who could tell what each volley accomplished of death and destruction.

The women were wild, there on the housetop. Prayers from the women and imprecations from the men, and then a shell would light up the scene.

An Eyewitness Report

From a memoir by William Merrick Bristol, a teacher visiting Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1861

But it was not fearful, anxious faces I saw as I hurried down to the Battery for an outlook seaward. It was a pell mell rush; running until out of breath, slackening speed for a second, then on again, catching hold of carts or wagons going in that direction, until panting and hardly yet knowing why it is we are here, we look out across the harbor. Boom, boom go the cannon. Now the puff of white smoke comes from Fort Johnson. There goes one from Castle Pinckney. The Floating Battery, too, has taken position, while Steven’s Battery, the first to speak on that momentous morning, still continues to send forth its iron messengers. Fort Moultrie also joins the fray and thus from all sides shot and shell pour down upon that one sole representative of the detested northern oppressor. All the pent up hatred of the past months and years is voiced in the thunder of these cannon, and the people seem almost beside themselves in the exultation of a freedom they deem already won.

25.

The Clarion Notes of Defiance

April 13, 1861

FORT SUMTER HAS FALLEN.

At approximately 2:30 p.m. on April 13, Major Robert Anderson, commander of the installation, agreed to evacuate the massive fortress that he and his troops have occupied for 110 days. His decision followed a thirty-four-hour bombardment that began at 4:30 on the morning before, after Major Anderson failed to accede to an ultimatum to quit the fort that had been issued by General Pierre G.T. Beauregard of the Confederate Army.

The long-anticipated, long-feared war has begun.

“The Heavens were obscured by rain clouds, and it was as dark as Erebus,” wrote a correspondent for the Associated Press, describing the scene in Charleston. “The guns were heard distinctly, the wind blowing in shore. Sometimes a shell would burst in mid air, directly over Fort Sumter. Nearly all night long all the streets were thronged with people full of excitement and enthusiasm. The house-tops, the Battery, the wharves, the shipping, in fact every available place was taken possession of by the multitude.”

The barrage continued throughout the night of April 12 until well after dark. At some point in the afternoon it became evident that something in the fort was on fire. Smoke billowed above the ramparts, and became thicker and blacker as the day went on. Firing on the fort resumed at daybreak Saturday, with smoke still evident.

The fort’s capitulation occurred on Saturday afternoon, after a shell struck the fort’s flagstaff. Believing that Major Anderson had struck his colors, an aide to General Beauregard, Colonel Louis Wigfall, the former senator from Texas, commandeered a rowboat and ventured to the fort, where, under a white flag—his scarf—he sought a meeting with Major Anderson. “You have defended your fort nobly, sir. You have done all that it is possible to do. General Beauregard wants to stop this fight.” Major Anderson agreed, after securing the promise that he and his men could salute their flag upon departure. The word “surrender” was never used.

At least 4,000 and perhaps as many as 5,000 shells were fired at the fort, causing considerable destruction. The Federal forces fired approximately 1,000 shells in return but inflicted little damage. No casualties were reported on either side.

Throughout a significant portion of the bombardment, the AP correspondent reported, four vessels with “long, black hulls and smoke-stacks” identified as Federal steamers ranged in line directly over the bar. They lurked portentously, but never came in close enough to offer battle.

The commander of the vessels has assured the Confederate command that no effort will be made to land any troops. The boats now await Major Anderson and his men, who are expected to leave Fort Sumter tomorrow after offering a final salute to their flag.

The bombardment concluded a drama that began the day after Christmas last year, when Anderson and his men stealthily decamped their base in Charleston’s vulnerable Fort Moultrie and took up residence in the formidable Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The stand-off that began then reached the apogee of anxiety in the past two weeks, as governments in Washington and Montgomery wrestled with decisions that inexorably inched the disputing parties closer to a point of no return and to armed conflict.

By the end of last week, President Lincoln authorized two rescue missions to beleaguered forts in Southern harbors: a largely Navy expedition to relieve Sumter and a largely Army mission to reinforce Fort Pickens in Pensacola. Knowing that any relief mission would be considered by Confederate leaders to be a provocative act of war, Lincoln accepted the recommendation of Secretary of State Seward to make it abundantly clear that the flotilla had been sent only to bring provisions to the hungry men of Fort Sumter, and that the ships will not land troops or fire upon ground forces unless they fire first. On Monday, April 8, two days after the relief mission departed the Brooklyn Navy Yard, emissaries from President Lincoln arrived in Charleston and hand-delivered his message to Governor Pickens of South Carolina.

Two weeks ago, having chosen to relieve Sumter rather than abandon it, Lincoln showed that he would prefer to accept war than evade it. Now, with the delivery of this message, Lincoln all but insured that if there was going to be war, the South would be the one to initiate hostilities.

Pickens telegraphed Lincoln’s message to Montgomery, where President Davis convened a meeting of his Cabinet. Its recommendation was clear and close to unanimous: Beauregard must issue Anderson an ultimatum to surrender, and take the fort if he declined. Only Robert Toombs, the Confederacy’s secretary of state and one of the prime architects of secession, argued against the response. The South must ignore the provocation, he told Davis in a memo. “The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen. . . . You will lose us every friend in the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest, which extends from mountains to ocean. Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.”

But whatever luxury Davis may have once had evaporated last week when the Secession Convention in Virginia decisively voted against seceding—which all but killed the idea that Virginia and the seven other slave-holding border states might of their own free will peaceably choose to join the Confederacy. This left the nascent nation comprised of seven states, populated by five million people, not very rich, not very powerful, and not especially unified. One week after Virginia’s decision, the possibility that the Confederacy had already peaked was prompting a fear that some Southerners might start remorsefully seeking reconstruction with the North. Resolving the Fort Sumter stand-off would be the antidote to that infection.

“The country is sinking into a fatal apathy, and even the patriotism of the people is oozing out under this do-nothing policy,” said the Mobile Mercury. “If something decisive is not done pretty soon, either evacuation or expulsion, the whole country will become so disgusted with the sham of southern independence that the first chance the people get at a popular election they will turn the whole movement topsy-turvy.” The Charleston Mercury forcefully agreed. “Border southern states will never join us until we have indicated our power to free ourselves—until we have proven that a garrison of seventy men cannot hold the portal of our commerce. Let us be ready for war. The fate of the southern Confederacy hangs by the ensign halyards of Fort Sumter.”

Speaking to Davis at a Cabinet meeting in Montgomery, J.G. Gilchrist, one of the secession leaders in Alabama, made the point most sharply of all: “South Carolina has the power of putting us beyond the reach of reconstruction by taking Fort Sumter. . . . Unless you sprinkle blood in the face of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the old union in less than ten days.”

Davis could not have relished the prospect of war—he knew the South’s deficiencies in manpower, arms, wealth—but neither was he surprised to find its grievous image at his council table. Five times in his inaugural address he made reference to its gathering threat, and surely his own military background as a graduate of West Point, as a commander during the Mexican war, and as Secretary of War, commended him to the men who selected him for this position. The possibility of this moment was implied when he accepted the post. Lying supine upon a couch, smoking cigars to relieve a throbbing headache, Davis reached his decision. He ordered Leroy Walker, his Secretary of War, to send General Beauregard this telegram: “You must immediately demand Sumter’s evacuation. If Anderson does not obey, proceed, in such manner as you may determine, to reduce it.” Beauregard sent three aides—Colonel James Chesnut, Colonel James A. Chisholm, and Captain Stephen D. Lee—to deliver the message.

Anderson had been told by President Buchanan in December that he should not feel obliged to “make a vain and useless sacrifice” of his men “on a mere point of honor.” Receiving Beauregard’s aides at 3:45 on Thursday afternoon, Anderson asked if General Beauregard, having issued this ultimatum, would open his batteries without further notice. Chesnut was puzzled by this question, but on his own authority assured Anderson that this would not happen. Anderson refused the ultimatum, but went on to say, “Gentlemen, if you do not batter the fort to pieces about us, we shall be starved out in a few days.” Chesnut then asked if that had been an official report. No, said Major Anderson, just information. Once an artillery professor at West Point, Anderson no doubt hoped that the man who had once been his best pupil, a cadet named Pierre Beauregard, would understand.

And he did. Beauregard telegraphed the information back to Secretary Walker in Montgomery. “Do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter.”

Walker responded, “If Major Anderson will state the time at which, as indicated by him, he will evacuate, and agree that in the meantime he will not use his guns against us, unless ours should be employed against Fort Sumter, you are authorized thus to avoid the effusion of blood. If this, or its equivalent, be refused, reduce the fort.”

Chesnut and Lee carried this message back to Sumter at 12:45 on the morning of April 12. Anderson evaded making a reply for several hours, but finally responded. We will evacuate on April 15, he told the emissaries, assuming that no one fires on the American flag, and assuming I get no further messages from Washington.

But Chesnut knew what Beauregard knew, and what Anderson did not: Patrol boats had sighted Federal warships outside Charleston Harbor not hours away. “We will begin firing in one hour,” Chesnut replied.

The previous November, Chesnut, then a United States senator, spoke to a fervid crowd the night before the presidential election. He told the audience that the results of the election would present them with the choice between submission or defiance. “For myself,” he said, “I would unfurl the Palmetto flag, fling it to the breeze, and . . . ring the clarion notes of defiance in the face of an insolent foe.” Five months after that speech, one hour after leaving Major Anderson, Chesnut gave a battery under the command of Captain George S. James the order to open fire. Lieutenant Henry S. Farley pulled a lanyard on a ten-inch mortar. The shell arced into the air and exploded about 100 feet above the fort with spectacular display.

In Montgomery, huge, boisterous crowds gathered outside the Exchange Hotel to serenade President Davis. Secretary of War Walker came out and addressed his fellow Alabamans. “No man can foretell the events of the war inaugurated,” he preened, “but I will venture to predict that the flag which now floats on the breeze above Fort Sumter will before the first of May float over the dome of the old Capitol at Washington, and if they choose to try Southern chivalry, and test the extent of Southern resources, will eventually float over Faneuil Hall.”

Still ill, Jefferson Davis remained abed.

Verbatim

For the Record

Major Robert Anderson, April 14, 1861

Our southern brethren have done grievously wrong, they have rebelled and attacked their father’s house and their loyal brothers. They must be punished and brought back, but this necessity breaks my heart.

President Jefferson Davis, April 16, 1861

Fort Sumter is ours, and nobody is hurt. With mortar, Paixhan and petard, we tender “Old Abe” our Beau-regard.

26.

Patriots and Traitors

April 20, 1861

FORT SUMTER’S FALL galvanized both sides. Southerners, who are seldom reluctant to boast about their fighting skills or to invent occasions to demonstrate them, crowed like a rooster who had made a thousand suns come up. The Atlanta Confederacy wrote, “If the fanatical Nigger Republican North is resolved to force [war] upon us, we are ready to meet it.”

Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina—whose leadership since the start of the secession crisis was greatly mocked by Charleston’s elites, but which is forgotten now that he is one of the many fathers of victory—thumped his chest and said, “Let it lead to what it might, even if it leads to blood and ruin. . . . We have defeated their twenty millions, we have met them and conquered them. We have humbled the flag of the United States before the Palmetto and the Confederate.”

But the insult suffered by Old Glory and Major Anderson’s steely defense of Sumter have inspired the North as well. “All squeamish sentimentality should be discarded, and bloody vengeance wreaked upon the heads of the contemptible traitors,” wrote the Columbus Daily Capital City Fact. Said Senator Stephen Douglas, the president’s erstwhile rival, “There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots or traitors.” Everywhere in the North, flags and bunting were hung from every window and porch rail; in Pittsburgh, lampposts sported nooses sashed with the slogan “Death to Traitors!” The word seldom spoken as states seceded is now on every lip.

On Monday, April 15, President Lincoln, quoting almost exactly the language of the 1795 Militia Act, passed during the Washington administration at the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, called upon the state militias to provide 75,000 men for Federal service. (Some of his Cabinet encouraged him to summon more, perhaps as many as 200,000 men, but the president, grasping that he did not yet have mechanisms in place for arming and provisioning even 75,000, seemed content to merely quadruple the size of the nation’s Army.)

Each state was also given a proportional quota to meet: seventeen regiments (13,280 men) from New York, sixteen regiments from Pennsylvania (12,500 men), and so on. Northern states responded quickly and with determination. Said the governor of Maine, Israel Washburn, “The people of Maine of all parties will rally with alacrity.” To the call for thirteen regiments from Ohio, Governor Dennison responded, “Without seriously repressing the ardor of the people, I can hardly stop short of twenty.” Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts was brief: “Two of our regiments will start this afternoon . . . a third will be dispatched tomorrow, and fourth before the end of the week.”

But Lincoln’s proclamation proved to be the straw that broke the back of Unionism in Virginia. Less than two weeks previously, delegates to Virginia’s secession convention had rejected secession by an emphatic eighty-eight to forty-five vote. But no sooner had news of Sumter’s capitulation reached Richmond on Saturday evening last, than thousands of Virginians were parading in the street with the new seven-starred, three-striped flag of the Confederacy at its head, and with a marching band’s incessant refrains of “Dixie” competing for aural supremacy with huzzahs for Jeff Davis. When the crowd reached the Tredegar foundry, they cheered the workers who had forged the Columbiads whose shells had so damaged Fort Sumter, and the workers responded by raising their own Confederate flag and firing off cannons in salute. The parade then snaked its way to the offices of the Richmond Enquirer, whose fire-eating editor delivered an impromptu address. Then holding torches high and passing bonfires on every corner, the marchers converged on the governor’s mansion at Capital Square, where the band played “Dixie” and “La Marseillaise,” cannons that had been appropriated from the Fayette Artillery boomed out a 100-gun salute, and the crowd, among whom one or two might have been drinking, chanted “Letcher! Letcher!” in demand for an appearance by the governor.

They got him, but they could not have been pleased. Long a Union man, the thin, bald, bespectacled John Letcher stepped outside and sternly instructed the crowd to go put the cannons back where they found them. “I see no occasion for this demonstration,” he said, and with the reminder that Virginia was still a state in the Union, went back inside.

Denied a bravura ending to the evening by the governor, the crowd devised one on its own. They stormed the Capitol building and scaled its roof, where they raised the Confederate flag. After more boisterous singing and speechmaking, the mob drifted off. When at last they had all gone, Letcher ordered the capital guard to remove the flag and replace it with the state flag of Virginia, the one bearing the defiant motto Sic Semper Tyrannus.

But any hope Letcher may have had of riding out this storm of political emotion and keeping Virginia in the Union was being seriously undermined. The first saboteur, unfortunately, was the President of the United States; Lincoln’s call for troops requisitioned 3,500 men from Virginia, which had an incendiary effect. The idea that Virginians might be called upon to fight and kill South Carolinians appalled the secessionists, but had a shocking effect on Unionists as well. John Minor Botts, a former congressman who has been perhaps Virginia’s most steadfast defender of the Union, sadly called the proclamation “the most unfortunate state paper that ever issued from any executive since the establishment of the government.”

Letcher might have somehow sidestepped the proclamation—after all, the governors of Delaware and Kentucky declined to honor the president’s call—and even in the heat of the moment might have managed to use the substantial Unionist sentiment in the state to prevent Virginia from leaving. But he also had to contend with Henry Wise, the former governor. With fierce eyes and a scowling mouth that suggest the visage of an eagle, Wise is self-confident and disdainful of both Letcher’s style and policy. He is also an ardent secessionist who is determined to lead Virginia into the Confederacy. Conspiring with several high officers of Virginia’s militia, Wise plotted to seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry (one of only two in the country), with its 15,000 stand of arms, and the Federal Navy Yard in Norfolk, with its modern dry dock. The men decided to seize the facilities, although as a courtesy, Wise sought Governor Letcher’s approval. Letcher demurred; he did not feel it would be honorable to act in advance of the Secession Convention—called to meet again. Wise felt no such scruples, and ordered that the facilities be seized on the morrow. “You have been governor,” said one of Wise’s co-conspirators, cavalry officer Turner Ashby. “We will take orders from you, sir, as if you were now governor.”

Ashby’s blithe willingness to jettison the niceties of democratic elections and help turn Henry Wise into a Julius Caesar-like dictator never had to withstand much of a challenge, because the very next morning, Wise notified Letcher that a plan was afoot to seize the armory, and Letcher yielded in the face of the fait accompli. Shortly thereafter, at the Secession Convention, Wise was called upon. Rising in his seat, he dramatically produced a large horse pistol, the long-barreled type that is holstered on a saddle, and laid it on his desk. “I know that armed forces are now moving upon Harper’s Ferry to capture the arms there in the arsenal for the public defense,” he said, “and there will be a fight or a foot race between volunteers of Virginia and federal troops before the sun sets this day!”

A few delegates continued to object, but it was all for naught. The prospect of the federal government requisitioning thousands of Virginians to kill South Carolinians was too much to bear. The Secession Convention reversed its earlier decision, and by a vote of eighty-eight to fifty-five, seceded from the United States, with many a brokenhearted and reluctant Union man providing the margin of victory. At a public rally that evening, former president John Tyler stood with Governor de jure Letcher and Governor de facto Wise, and sanctified the decision. “The people of the South have submitted to aggression until secession was a duty,” he said. “The Almighty will smile upon our work this day.”

Two days later, the approximately 1,000 officers and men of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, en route to Washington, D.C., in response to the president’s summons, had to change trains in Baltimore. As they marched from the Camden Station to the Pratt Street Station, they were set upon by a pro-secession mob said to be perhaps 2,000 strong. The mob attacked the soldiers; at first they threw rocks and bottles, but soon someone among the rioters who was armed opened fire. With that the troops defended themselves and fired into the crowd and at buildings, the crowd shrieked and ran, and the troops hurried away—but not before there was more gunfire. Four soldiers and eleven civilians were slain, and an untold number were wounded.

Though long in arriving, the war had come at last.

Acknowledgments

These stories first appeared in a slightly different form in The New York Times, which created the Disunion series in the Opinionator section of its website to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. I would like to thank the editors of the Times, most especially my longtime friend George Kalogerakis, as well as his entire team, for backing this idea and giving it such a supportive home. Thanks also to Byliner Books, particularly my friend Michael Solomon, for their enthusiasm and insight, and to my agent, David McCormick.

I also wish to thank those historians of the Civil War whose work was the source for this entire narrative. I am particularly indebted to Bruce Chadwick, William C. Davis, David Detzer, Ernest B. Furgurson, William W. Freehling, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Harold Holzer, Michael P. Johnson, Maury Klein, Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, Russell McClintock, Stephanie McCurry, James M. McPherson, William Lee Miller, Allan Nevins, Albert B. Saye, Craig L. Symonds, and David Williams. Their work is an inspiration.

Finally, I wish to thank once again my parents, Clem and Irene Malanowski, who during the great centennial took us from our home in Baltimore to visit Gettysburg, Antietam, Bull Run, Harper’s Ferry, Fredericksburg, and all the souvenir stands within. Thank you for everything.

Photo Credits

Lincoln campaign flag: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pga-01637; Lincoln-Douglas political cartoon:

Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-15777; James Buchanan: Library of Congress, LC-BH82101-6628; The Folly of Secession: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-92039; Jefferson Davis portrait by Mathew Brady: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-23852; Abraham Lincoln portrait by Mathew Brady:

Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-112729; Fort Sumter flag: National Park Service; Author photo: Maria Malanowski.

About the Author

Jamie Malanowski has been an editor at Time, Esquire, and Spy, and is the author of the novel The Coup. For more details, visit www.jamiemalanowski.com.

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