He anticipated that the burden of responsibility would be so heavy that he had said, in remarks at the train station as he left Springfield for the long trip to the capital, that he would have “a task before me greater than that which rested on Washington,” and few either then or later have disputed that estimate. But although he expected the burden to be immense, he surely had not expected its whole weight to come crashing down upon him instantly.
Abraham Lincoln achieved a new level of poetic eloquence with the mystic chords and better angels in his last paragraph on March 4—but he would need something beyond eloquence on March 5. He had made a good speech on Monday—but no speech would solve his quandary on Tuesday. Fulfilling his duties as the executive and the commander would now require of him qualities beyond any he had exhibited before—and right away.
Lincoln would himself underline how abrupt it was, both in private and in a formal public report four months later. On the evening of July 3, as Congress was assembling, the president had a conversation with his friend Orville Browning, who had just been chosen to be senator from Illinois. “The first thing that was handed to me after I entered this room, when I came from the Inauguration,” Lincoln told Browning, “was the letter from Maj. Anderson saying that their provisions would be exhausted before an expedition could be sent to their relief.” And in his message read to Congress when it convened on July 4, he would take the trouble to insert a parenthetical reference to the firstness of it: “On the 5th of March (the present incumbent’s first full day in office),” he wrote, “a letter from Major Anderson…written on February 28th and received at the War Department on the 4th of March, was, by that Department, placed in his hands.” Along with Anderson’s letter, he said, there were papers from the nine officers who shared command at Sumter, all of them concurring in Anderson’s opinion that reinforcement could not be accomplished before their provisions ran out. This president thus had a mammoth and pivotal decision thrust upon him—immediately. He learned from Major Anderson’s letter those shocking new items that Buchanan and Holt had learned the day before: that the shortness of supplies for Fort Sumter meant that they could not hold out more than six weeks without new provisions, and that the Confederates had so ringed the fort with threatening military batteries and fortifications as to make it now impossible to relieve his little garrison with anything less than a force of “twenty thousand good and well disciplined men.”
The limitations of the available force were made clearer still when a month later the adjutant general gave him the particulars of the distribution: Department of the East, 3,894; Department of the West, 3,584; Department of Texas, 2,258; Department of New Mexico, 2,624; Department of Utah, 685; Department of the Pacific, 3,382; Miscellaneous, 686; grand total officers and men, 17,113. That was the U.S. Army when the Civil War began.
Grant would write in his memoirs that “the northern press” reported that Buchanan’s secretary of war John Floyd, before he resigned, had “scattered the little army the country had so that the most of it could be picked up in detail when secession occurred.” After scattering the army, Floyd resigned and became a Confederate general.
MAJOR ANDERSON and his engineer John G. Foster and the other officers in Fort Sumter plainly expected the facts they presented would evoke an order from the authorities in Washington that they evacuate the fort. So, manifestly, did the outgoing administration. The covering letter from Joseph Holt, Floyd’s successor as secretary of war, was largely intended to absolve the previous administration from any blame for the evacuation that now, obviously, had to be ordered. Holt said, defensively, that these new communications from Anderson and his garrison at Sumter were “of a most important and unexpected character,” as he put it in his first paragraph, and “[take] the Department by surprise,” as he said in his last one. “His [Anderson’s] previous correspondence contained no such intimation.” Holt cited the exchange of letters with Anderson, underlining Anderson’s having said on December 31 that “still we are safe” and “we can command this Harbor as long as our government wishes to keep it.” And again, on the sixth of January, Anderson had written (said Holt), “My position will…enable me to hold this post against any force which can be brought against me.” Holt quoted his own message to Anderson of January 16:
Your late despatches…have relieved the Government of the apprehensions previously entertained for your safety. In consequence, it is not its purpose, at present, to reenforce you…Whenever in your judgment, additional supplies or reinforcements are necessary for your safety…you will at once communicate the fact to this Department.
But Anderson had made no such communication. He had on the contrary discouraged any attempt to relieve the fort. Holt’s letter, an exercise in self-justification by the Buchanan administration, insisted that they had been ready to act if Anderson had indicated the need. They had in fact had a small expedition in preparation for possible use—but nothing like what Anderson was now saying would be needed.
If the new messages from Fort Sumter were a surprise and a shock to the outgoing president and his secretary of war, how much more of a surprise and a shock must they have been to the new president, not yet even seated at his desk?
Lincoln lived a thousand years between March 5 and April 14, 1861. In his conversation with Browning on July 3 he made a personal comment, a version of which both Browning and Nicolay got down on paper. Nicolay reports his having said: “Browning, of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begins to compare with those I had between the Inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them I would not have believed it possible to survive them.” Browning in his diary has Lincoln saying that “all the troubles and anxieties of his life had not equaled those which intervened between [the inauguration] and the fall of Sumter.”
Lincoln not only had no honeymoon; he had no fresh beginning. Not only was he thrust immediately into the necessity of decision-making, he was also pushed into a corner, and his range of decision was sharply skewed by the events of the previous four months that culminated in the papers now in his hand. When in later years we hold in our minds the figure of Lincoln as our world has come to see him—the brooding giant on a throne in the Lincoln Memorial, for example—we may imagine that when this giant came upon the scene, history stopped for a beat or two, drew a line, and took a tidy new start, beginning the world anew again, as it were. But that image is totally wrong. The day was already far gone when Lincoln became president; he entered not only in medias res but also at the end of long series of mounting crises that were just now reaching a crescendo.
Fort Sumter, which Lincoln now suddenly learned to be in peril, had acquired a particularly heavy symbolic significance to both sides, for reasons of geography and recent history. It was one of four military installations ringing the harbor of the primary city in the state that had more than any other nurtured and led the rebellion, which claimed after December 20, 1860, to be all by its miniature self an independent nation, the Republic of South Carolina.
Fort Sumter had been further singled out for unique symbolic visibility for both sides by the daring, secret, surprise move of the Union garrison from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter on the night of December 26, 1860. Major Robert Anderson, who commanded the garrison of a hundred men, perceived from daily observation of the rebels’ drilling and military preparation and from what they plainly said that there would soon be an assault on his Union band in Fort Moultrie, the only remaining place the American flag was flying after all other federal installations in the state and the city and the harbor had been taken over. The secessionists in their excitement after passing the ordinance and celebrating with fireworks on December 20 told Anderson, “We have to have the forts.” Fort Moultrie, on a finger of the mainland, was markedly vulnerable; Fort Sumter, on a rocky island in the middle of the harbor, was much more defensible. Anderson had asked for reinforcements, but the Buchanan administration had sent none. There was, however, a bo
ld step Anderson could take on his own: a sudden nighttime transfer of his force in boats silently crossing the harbor, evading the secessionists’ guard boats, landing the Union soldiers on Fort Sumter without being discovered. “By nine o’clock that night…the officers sat down to eat the supper in Sumter that had been cooked for them in Moultrie.” News of this daring act thrilled supporters of the Union, stunned the South Carolina rebels, made Major Anderson a hero in the North, and loaded Fort Sumter with additional symbolic resonance. A president of the United States would not thereafter lightly order that this brave garrison should now withdraw from the position that had been gained with such courageous audacity.
Sumter’s symbolic meaning was elevated still another notch by an effort in January to reinforce it. December had brought resignations and new appointments in the Buchanan administration, a stronger Union-supporting contingent (including Edwin Stanton as the new attorney general)—and a brief flurry of action supporting the Union. The administration sent a merchant steamer, the Star of the West, with supplies and 250 recruits to reinforce the garrison at Fort Sumter. Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, another secessionist still in the cabinet, learned of the effort and notified his friends in Charleston. The South Carolina rebels, after Anderson’s transfer of the garrison to Sumter on December 26, took over Fort Moultrie and the other military installations in the harbor, hoisted over these U.S. government installations a Palmetto flag, and began the buildup that Secretary Holt would later report to President Lincoln. When in the early morning of January 9 the Star of the West approached Charleston Harbor, a shell was fired across her bow; the captain hoisted a larger American flag, only to be greeted with further rebel fire. When the Star of the West was fired upon, it turned back to sea and headed home to New York. Many believed that the government should have responded to this event as a provocation that justified a counterattack, a cause of war. And it heightened yet again the symbolic significance of the fort that the ship had been attempting to supply.
When the firing on Sumter began on the night of April 12, it would be not the first or the second but the third time the American flag had been insulted (to use Anderson’s word) in Charleston Harbor. On April 3 a schooner named R. H. Shannon, bound from Boston to Savannah with a cargo of ice, in trouble in the fog at sea, with a captain who apparently was not a close student of current events, would in all innocence try to put in at the nearest port, Charleston. Astonished at being fired upon, the captain would raise the American flag, and would be still more astonished to be fired upon again, and would swiftly scuttle back out into the Atlantic.
ALL THROUGH THE DAYS when he confronted the Sumter crisis Lincoln, the party politician, was coping with office-seekers. He “was besieged from morning till night in his ante-rooms, in his parlors, in his library, in his office, at his matins, at his breakfast, before and after dinner, and all night, until wearied and worn he goes to rest.” Lincoln himself remarked that he thought that about thirty thousand people were seeking jobs in this new, first Republican administration. And then he added cheerfully that that still left about thirty million Americans who were not looking for a job.
LINCOLN HAD MADE CLEAR in his inaugural address the two large moral commitments that would govern his decision about Fort Sumter. They were in sharp conflict with each other, and they both had practical reinforcement. The first was the fundamental obligation underlying everything he did, to which he had solemnly sworn on the previous afternoon, to “preserve, protect, and defend” the constitutional union. In light of the other moral consideration, he had made an implicit qualification of the application of his oath to the preservation of federal facilities: in his draft for the inaugural he did not say that he would “reclaim” the fallen forts and arsenals, as he believed the Union had an abstract right to do; instead he said only, under the conditions that prevailed, that he would “hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the Government.” His implicit postponement of any attempt to recover the fallen forts and properties increased the imperative to hold on to those that remained in Union hands—Fort Pickens and above all Sumter.
There was, however, the second obligation that limited how he could do that holding—let alone reclaiming. Lincoln had made repeated specific promises not to initiate armed conflict. He had said to the “assailants of the Government” that “you can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors…[T]here needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority.” He said that “there will be no invasion—no using of force against, or among the people anywhere.” He had said, “The government will not assail you.”
This reiterated promise also provided reassurance to the population whose support Lincoln had to win or to hold—in particular the Upper South—that there would be no “coercion.”
Between these contending claims, Lincoln had a precise, concrete decision to make under the pressure of time with the salt pork running out: Should he order Major Anderson and the beleaguered garrison at Sumter to withdraw?
THE NEW PRESIDENT ON HIS FIRST DAY SAYS NO
WHAT SHOULD A NEW president, only a few hours into his presidency, do with the astounding communication from Anderson and Holt and the others describing the desperate situation about Sumter? Obviously, he should call on the best available military advice. For Lincoln, this advice would be provided by General in Chief Winfield Scott.
Scott is one of the large figures of American military history, a hero from the War of 1812, general in chief of the army already in 1841, one of the two great victorious generals in the Mexican War, the hero of Chapultepec, an associate of every president from Thomas Jefferson to Lincoln himself, the first person since George Washington to be granted by Congress the pay, rank, and emoluments of a lieutenant general. And so should not this new and inexperienced president be guided by the experienced General Scott?
The whole bundle of information about Fort Sumter was presented to General Scott, who wrote his comment as an endorsement on the letter that Holt handed Lincoln on his first day. Most summaries of these events, including Lincoln’s own in his July 4 Message to Congress, do not convey the degree to which General Scott’s answer was couched in terms of a lament for missed opportunities. He started right off: “When Major Anderson first threw himself into Fort Sumter it would have been easy to reinforce him.” But alas that chance was missed. The general went on to say that “Fort Moultrie has since been re-armed & greatly strengthened. The difficulty of reinforcing has now been increased 10 or 15 fold.” The chance to save the fort had passed. “I see no alternative but a surrender, as…we cannot send the third of the men in several months necessary to give them relief.”
General Scott also informed the new president about the danger to the other fort still in Union hands, Fort Pickens in Florida, and mentioned “some thing like a truce established between the President [Buchanan] & a number of principal seceders—which truce or informal understanding included Ft. Pickens.” Lincoln was now learning about this truce, and perhaps even about the danger to Pickens, for the first time.
General Scott on that very first day of the Lincoln presidency returned the Sumter papers to the new president not through the War Department but through William Henry Seward—another sign of the important role that many expected Seward to fill.
Major Anderson and his nine officers clearly expected that the report they sent would bring from the new civilian authorities an order to evacuate the fort. Joseph Holt’s cover letter, giving the interpretation of events favored by the Buchanan administration, clearly was written in the expectation that the new president would have to order an evacuation, and with the intention to make clear that it was not their fault.
General Winfield Scott, by all means the most important military authority, said there was now no alternative but surrender. William Henry Seward, by all means the most important political leader in the president’s party, had been actively seeking
the evacuation of Fort Sumter and had effectively promised the “commissioners,” who had been sent by the Confederates to attempt a deal, that it would happen. In the evening of his first full day in office—very full indeed—Seward and Lincoln conferred at length, and one may surely infer that Seward told the president that he should tell Scott to order Anderson and his garrison to withdraw.
But President Lincoln, altogether new to the job, did not order the surrender of the fort.
The summary of these events that Lincoln would present to Congress on July 4 would contain a significant little alteration of what he first wrote. This little alteration obscures a large presidential decision. After noting that General Scott concurred with Major Anderson in the view that Sumter must be evacuated, Lincoln wrote in the draft of the next sentence, “At the request of the executive, however, he [meaning General Scott] took full time” and consulted with others and thought it over some more. It is that draft, we may surely conclude, that tells us what actually happened. Hastily editing this document in the pressure of events in late June, Lincoln struck out the phrase “at the request of the executive” and substituted the phrase “on reflection,” which made it sound as though General Scott had initiated the reflecting that caused him to draw back and take “full time” and confer with others and consider the matter again. But it was not Scott’s initiative that caused this drawing back and reconsidering; it was Lincoln’s—“at the request of the executive.” That this newly arrived amateur had turned aside a decision that had been virtually already made by all the old professionals was in itself an immense development. No plan to evacuate Sumter would be set in motion that day.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 7