President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  ON THIS INAUGURATION DAY the unusually tall president-elect unfolded himself and unfolded his manuscript, adjusted his glasses, and either did or did not look around for a place to put his hat, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas either did or did not take and hold the hat during Lincoln’s address.

  We may picture James Buchanan, at that moment still President Buchanan, sitting behind him, listening, perhaps tilting his large head to the side as he was wont to do, to the man who would shortly become his successor. Buchanan might already have begun to formulate the defensive claim with which he would occupy the rest of his life: that what this man was saying was not really all that different from what he had already himself maintained.

  Buchanan had said these things especially in his last annual message, read to the opening of Congress on the previous December 3, after the Election Day victory of the Republicans in November. And then after South Carolina had passed its ordinance of secession on December 20, and other cotton states had followed suit, he had continued his argument in messages to Congress on January 8 and 28. Whereas Lincoln was now saying, “The Union of these states is perpetual…no government proper ever had provision in its organic law for its own termination,” he, Buchanan, the supposedly discredited president now on the way out, had said in almost the same language, “The Union of these states was designed to be perpetual…Its framers never intended the absurdity of providing for its own destruction.” Where Lincoln was now saying, “No state upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union,” he, Buchanan, had already said that “no state has a right upon its own act to secede from the Union.” He, Buchanan, had contributed to the argument a metaphor better than any literary touch in these pages of Lincoln’s address, when he had written back in December that an assertion that the federal government is a mere voluntary association, to be dissolved at pleasure, would make it “a rope of sand.”

  In this newcomer’s careful statements of what he would do, and refrain from doing, as president, Buchanan again might have heard an echo of his own position. Lincoln said, “I shall take care that the laws…shall be faithfully executed,” a passage, as both presidents and many in the audience would know, taken directly from a clause in the Constitution. Buchanan, for his part, had said, “My province is to execute the laws.” If Lincoln now said that the power confided in him would be used “to hold, occupy, and possess the property belonging to the government,” Buchanan had said, “It is my duty at all times to defend and protect the public property.” And if Buchanan had added “as far as this may be practicable,” then he might notice that Lincoln too had said “so far as practicable.” And the gentle pleas and firm cautions, the appeals to patience and to time, and the reassurances that the federal government would not be the aggressor—all these that the vast listening crowd heard from the president-elect—all had parallels, in Buchanan’s mind, in his own messages. Buchanan had said—as Lincoln now said—that Lincoln’s election as president had been in “strict conformity to the Constitution” and provided no just cause for revolution. In his retirement in Pennsylvania, as a mammoth civil war unfolded, Buchanan would spend his last days writing a defense of his presidency, and part of his defense would be that he and the man chosen to succeed him had, on these points, no serious differences.

  TO OTHERS IN THE AUDIENCE on March 4, 1861, the suggestion that there was an overlapping between the ideas of the two presidents would seem preposterous. The young assistant that Lincoln had brought with him from Illinois—John G. Nicolay, who at that moment was the new president’s entire staff—would write, many years later, of that annual message composed by President Buchanan and presented to Congress the previous December: “As a specimen of absurdity, stupidity, and willful wrong-headedness, this message is not equaled in American political literature.”

  Before he rejected secession, in terms that might be compared to Lincoln’s, Buchanan had already vitiated the effect of doing so by blaming the entire crisis on “the long continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern states.” And if this president had thus identified the cause of the current troubles, he had also therefore the solution to them: all the antislavery agitation should stop. “All for which the slave states have ever contended,” Buchanan maintained, “is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.”

  The new president had never said, and would never say, anything like Buchanan’s inflammatory condemnation of the antislavery movement. On the contrary, he had a long record of opposition to slavery: his record, and his party’s position, were the reasons the seven slave states had rebelled. Now that he was about to become president, he gave an inaugural address, it is true, that would be a severe disappointment to abolitionists. He was undertaking an overwhelming new obligation: he was sworn to preserve the Union. His preoccupation had to be keeping as much of the Union behind him as he could, including the eight slave states that had not joined the rebellion, and conservative Northerners.

  So Lincoln in his address would start right off affirming his obligation to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, even reading it and insisting it would be as enforced as any other part of the Constitution. He would not only reiterate his pledge, the Republican Party’s pledge, not to interfere with slavery in the slave states, he would even include a last-minute insertion acquiescing in a proposed irrevocable amendment that prohibited that interference forever, which had just at four that morning passed in the Senate. Lincoln said he had not read this proposed amendment, and he said also that he understood that it represented no change from the prevailing constitutional situation; nevertheless this casual half endorsement was another shock to the antislavery forces. Frederick Douglass’s response to the whole address would be deep disappointment. He had had hopes for Lincoln, but he wrote in his monthly magazine that Lincoln’s address showed him to be no better than Buchanan. But Lincoln was decisively better than Buchanan, for all the concessions he had to make in his address. He made no analysis of the causes or the cure of the current troubles that remotely resembled that of Buchanan. He certainly did not blame the crisis on the abolitionists. And he put down an antislavery marker in just one sentence.

  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. This is the only substantial dispute.

  That was Lincoln’s only mention of the moral wrong of slavery in this address—but it was enough to make clear a profound difference from his predecessor and to be a harbinger.

  Lincoln’s endorsements of the constitutional provisions about slavery were concessions out of reluctant obligation and the political necessity of his new position and the perilous moment; Buchanan’s on the other hand sprang from his own manifest conviction.

  The passages in Buchanan’s messages that insisted (as Lincoln would) on the perpetuity of the Union and the illegitimacy of secession (making the Union a mere rope of sand) were further vitiated by the practical non-applications that followed them. Even though he said a state had no right to secede, the Union, said Buchanan, had no right to “coerce” a state to remain in the Union. A president could not act; he would have to refer an incipient rebellion to Congress—but then it appeared that Congress could not act either. It had no power, said President Buchanan, to make use of military might to “coerce a state by force or arms to remain in the Union.” William Seward gave what would become a famous witty summary of the position Buchanan had put forth: “[He] shows conclusively that it is the duty of the president to execute the laws—unless somebody opposes him; and that no state has a right to go out of the Union—unless it wants to.”

  Lincoln’s rigorous argument against secession was certainly not undercut by any such sudden attacks of impotence. His defense of the integrity of the Union was not put forward as an abstract exercise in constitutional explication without regard to practice, but was the philosophical ground for action. Althoug
h his address was as conciliatory as his conviction allowed, and a reasoned effort at persuasion with his “dissatisfied countrymen,” it was nevertheless implicitly clear that, should they persist, force would be used to prevent their seceding, and that the oath-bound president would be the one to use it. Lincoln’s concept of his presidential office did not begin with the modifier “mere.” It began instead with his sworn duty to “take care” that the laws be faithfully executed in the states—in all the states, as he would emphasize—and with the obligation to preserve the government to which he would swear in the oath.

  Where Buchanan had sought avoidance and found restriction and therefore excuse, this new president would accept responsibility and find necessity and therefore empowerment.

  WHEN AFTER THE INAUGURAL EVENTS President Lincoln and Citizen Buchanan, their extremely limited association about to draw to a close, were escorted to the president’s room in the Capitol, they had an exchange overheard by the young Illinoisan who was to join Nicolay on Lincoln’s staff, John Hay. “The courteous old gentleman took the new President aside for some parting words into the corner where I was standing,” Hay would write. “I waited with boyish wonder and credulity to see what momentous counsels were to come from that gray and weatherbeaten head. Every word must have its value at such an instant.”

  And so what in this pivotal moment in American history did John Hay hear the outgoing president tell his successor? “The ex-President said: ‘I think you will find the water of the right-hand well at the White-House better than that at the left,’ and went on with many intimate details of the kitchen and pantry.”

  As the two presidents ended their brief time together, Buchanan wished the new president happiness:

  [W]hile the battery on the brow of the hill thundered its salute, citizen Buchanan and President Lincoln returned to their carriage, and the military procession escorted them from the Capitol to the Executive Mansion on the threshold of which Mr. Buchanan warmly shook the hand of his successor, with cordial good wishes for his personal happiness and the national place and prosperity.

  Citizen Buchanan, instead of spending the evening drinking Madeira and enjoying his freedom, was distressed enough by that undigested last-minute letter from Major Anderson to gather members of his not-quite-out-of-office cabinet that evening, and again the next morning at the War Department, to go over a presentation of the matter to the new president. Their deliberations would be set forth in a letter signed and delivered by Secretary of War Joseph Holt, who would stay on briefly into the new administration.

  Finally, at midday on March 5, Buchanan, the only bachelor so far to have served as the nation’s president, made his way alone back to his home in Pennsylvania.

  PILED HIGH WITH DIFFICULTY

  IF THE NEW MAN had no long list of offices held, he certainly did have a virtuous regard for his responsibilities. And no American president, before or since, would face the exacting responsibilities that now confronted Lincoln. His election in November had been the trip wire for catastrophe. South Carolina’s convention, on December 20, with impudent promptness and without a dissenting vote, had passed an ordinance of secession, declared itself an independent republic, and celebrated with fireworks in Charleston. Now the long-threatened act of a state seceding from the Union was actually to be put to the test.

  A split screen showing the events that followed in the six weeks before Lincoln took the train for Washington would display scenes from three locations: in Springfield, Lincoln coping with office-seekers, reporters, and visiting politicians, shaping his cabinet, and writing letters to Republicans in Congress saying, “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery” in Washington, congressmen and senators scrambling to make some kind of Union-saving compromise, forming committees; in the Deep South, swift takeovers of federal forts, arsenals, customhouses, and U.S. mints. Then in January, one after another, conventions in the other deepest Southern cotton states voted to secede: Mississippi on January 9, Florida on January 10, Alabama on January 11, Georgia on January 19, Louisiana on January 26.

  On January 27 Lincoln requested “utmost privacy” and no more visitors before his departure on February 11. He locked himself “in a room upstairs over a store across the street from the State House” and in “the unromantic surroundings of a dingy and neglected back room,” with the short list of readings he had asked for, composed the draft of the first words he would speak to the whole nation, his First Inaugural Address. Lincoln wrote out his reasons why this Union was perpetual—from the nature of government everywhere and from the particular history of this nation. He stated, in a ringing paragraph, the conclusion applicable to the events that were taking place as he wrote: “It follows from these views that no state, upon its own motion, can lawfully get out of the Union—that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally nothing.” (Seward in Washington would persuade him to change that last word to the more lawyerly word “void.”)

  On February 2, as Texas was becoming the seventh state to proclaim its withdrawal from the Union, Lincoln was writing to a journalist that he had “the document already blocked out,” but that given “rapidly changing scenes” he would now hold it and revise it nearer delivery time. When we look at what Lincoln was writing alongside what the rebels were proclaiming, we find a radical contrast. The passionate secessionist statements were filled with fury; Lincoln’s address was, for the most part, a carefully reasoned effort at persuasion. The overwhelming preoccupations of the secessionist declarations were slavery and race, and the alleged mistreatment of the South by the North; Lincoln’s argument dealt with the nature of government and the perpetuity of the Union.

  Mississippi’s declaration of the “Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession” certainly made clear what the coming war would really be about:

  Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun…A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization…There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union…Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union.

  The proclamation by the Texas convention was quite explicitly racist:

  We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race…That the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race…That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations.

  While these and the other five first rebel states were making similar proclamations, Lincoln was writing a rigorous argument against what they were doing. His draft dealt not with slavery or race but with secession and union. He argued that the acts of violence taken, in the name of these legally nonexistent entities, against the installations and activities of the United States—the taking over of forts, mints, and armories; the interference with the mail; the firing on the Star of the West, sent to Fort Sumter with provisions; the threats to both Sumter and Fort Pickens—were, “according to circumstances,” either “insurrectionary or treasonable.” At the end of his draft he made clear that the choice of war or peace was in the hands of the
rebels: “With you, not with me, rests the solemn issue: Shall it be peace or the sword?”

  Perhaps more concretely shocking to the sensibilities of Unionists than the formal votes to secede had been those seizures of federal facilities that had preceded them, in a rapid series of snatchings in nine days, possibly by conspiratorial design. On January 3, 1861, Fort Pulaski in Georgia. Then the federal barracks in Baton Rouge; Forts Jackson and St. Philip in Louisiana; Fort Morgan in Alabama; and on January 12 the federal navy yard and Fort Barrancas in Pensacola, seized by Florida and Alabama troops. More seizures followed in February—nineteen federal army posts in Texas were taken in one fell swoop before the Texas ordinance of secession. Arsenals, post offices, customhouses, and hospitals were taken over. So was the U.S. mint in New Orleans. Lincoln himself would later make this summary: “[W]ithin these states, all the Forts, Arsenals, Dock-yards, Custom-houses, and the like, including the movable and stationary property in, and about them, had been seized, and were held in open hostility to this Government.”*1 The authority of the U.S. government in the seven seceded states was forced altogether out to the edges and reduced essentially to two places, hanging by a thread: Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay and Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

  Here is a sample of a rebel takeover of a federal facility. At “10 1/2 a.m. o’clock” on December 30—just ten days after South Carolina’s secession fireworks, before any other state seceded, and weeks before the Confederate government was formed—a Colonel John Cunningham in the South Carolina infantry sent this message to Captain F. C. Humphreys, the military storekeeper for ordinance at the U.S. Arsenal in Charleston: