Being astute in the matter of strategy is a worthy attribute of a statesman. Ramsdell also wrote that “too little credit has been given to Abraham Lincoln’s genius for political strategy.” Ramsdell’s praise of Lincoln (a prelude to damning him) extends to his writing: “Lincoln was a rare master of the written word…He had the skill of an artist in so phrasing a sentence that it conveyed precisely the meaning he wished it to convey.” Not only that, he could make it have different meanings to different audiences. That was what he did, according to Ramsdell, with that message to Pickens (and Beauregard, and from them to Jefferson Davis and company in Montgomery).
The charge is that the letter contained a threat, or even a double threat, which the Confederates would discern but others would not. Here is what Lincoln wrote, composing it carefully himself, giving instructions to Robert Chew:
Sir—you will proceed directly to Charleston, South Carolina; and if, on your arrival there, the flag of the United States shall be flying over Fort-Sumpter, and the Fort shall not have been attacked, you will procure an interview with Gov. Pickens, and read to him as follows:
I am directed by the President of the United States to notify you to expect an attempt will be made to supply Fort-Sumpter with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made, without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the Fort.
The North, says Ramsdell, would read in the statement only that Lincoln was sending bread (to brave and hungry men), and that if the rebels attacked they would be firing upon bread. The Southerners, by contrast, would read in the last part of the message a double threat hidden in a nest of negatives.
The first threat: If the bread-bringers were fired upon, then there would be an attack with soldiers and guns, with the flotilla of ships that the Confederates knew had sailed from New York.*14 Ramsdell describes their situation:
But to allow the provisioning meant not only an indefinite postponement to their possession of the fort which had become as much a symbol to them as it was to Lincoln; to permit it in the face of the threat of force, after all their preparations, would be to make a ridiculous and disgraceful retreat.
One may respond: Lincoln’s statement was a promise, a statement of what he would not do, before it was any kind of a threat. The threat, which was secondary to the promise, was only implicit. We have noted already that Lincoln had written in the draft of his inaugural, “The government will not assail you, unless you first assail it,” and that Seward, aware from the Senate of the thinness of Southern skin, suggested dropping “unless you first assail it” because those who heard the highest decibels of implicit threats would have heard one there. But of course the Union, like any government, would respond to an attack.
Lincoln’s statement was a double threat, according to Ramsdell, because a further threat was hidden in a negative, in the phrase “without further notice.” Did that not mean that at some later time, after the Sumter garrison had been given its pork and beans, there might be, after a notice was sent, an attack after all? Ramsdell writes: “Nor could they be sure that, if they yielded now in the matter of ‘provisions only,’ they would not soon be served with the ‘further notice’ as a prelude to throwing in ‘men, arms, and ammunition.’”
Surely it was evident that Lincoln could hardly have done that. If the rebels had allowed Sumter to be provisioned and Lincoln had then turned around and sent them a notice and attacked, Lincoln would have incurred a horrendous double odium. He would have been both the one who fired the “first shot” and the one who responded to restraint with aggression.
And—a point that runs through this event—being seen as the aggressor would have been much more damaging for Lincoln, and for the Union side, than for the rebels, because that sensitivity about “coercion” had been so thoroughly developed in the border states as well as the South. Had the Union taken overt action that appeared to be blatant aggression, then it surely would have lost not only the four states that ultimately did join the Confederacy but also Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, and as Lincoln said, that would have been the game.
IN YOUR HANDS AND NOT IN MINE
ONCE THE SHIPS of the Sumter expedition had set forth and the Confederate authorities had been notified that an attempt would be made, the burden of decision shifted to Montgomery and Charleston. Lincoln had managed to put before the assailants of the government, and before the world, an unmistakably plain acting-out of his inaugural pledge and claim: “You can forbear the assault upon it; I can not shrink from the defense of it. With you, and not with me, is the solemn question ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’”
Now Davis and the Confederate leaders had to decide what they would do. The distinguished Lincoln scholar Richard Current, in his Lincoln and the First Shot, writes about the respective roles of Jefferson Davis and Lincoln:
Biographers of Davis and historians of the Confederacy have evaded or obscured their hero’s role in the Sumter affair. They have digressed to levy accusations or innuendoes at Lincoln. If they have any concern for historical objectivity, however, they should face frankly the question of Davis’s responsibility for the coming of the war. Upon them, upon his partisans, should rest the burden of proof. It should not have to be borne forever, as it has for far too many years, by Lincoln’s champions. After all, Lincoln did not order the guns to fire. Davis did.
That Davis and his advisers might have chosen differently is indicated by Robert Toombs, the eminent Georgia politician who had been named secretary of state in the new Confederate government in Montgomery. Toombs is quoted as having said, about attacking the fort, “[I]t is unnecessary, it puts us in the wrong, it is fatal!” Jefferson Davis and the others, one might say, should have listened to Toombs, but in any case they could have—they were free to make other choices than the one they made.
Lincoln had strong reason to expect that the rebels would not allow provisions to be supplied to the fort. One of the visitors he sent down there to Charleston in the anxious six weeks, his friend Stephen Hulbert (who had grown up in Charleston), came back with the report that the rebel fervor was so strong and unanimous that even an attempt to bring supplies would be resisted. But the choice would be the rebels’.
In a passage often quoted, historian James G. Randall writes:
Of course Lincoln was aware that sending provisions to Sumter might provoke hostilities, but that is not to say that he desired hostilities. And to argue that Lincoln meant that the first shot would be fired by the other side if a first shot was fired is by no means the same as arguing that he deliberately maneuvered to have the shot fired.
The hundred men in the fort posed no threat to Charleston, but maybe the revolutionary fervor was puffed up to a point that letting the bread be provided was not an option.
Perhaps if the Montgomery authorities had ordered restraint, the Charleston hotheads would not have obeyed, and South Carolina would have acted on its own, rebels within a rebellion. And the new Confederacy would then have given an immediate example of the point that Lincoln had made in his inaugural. He had said that the principle of secession set a dangerous precedent that might one day turn around and bite the original secessionists.
Jefferson Davis and his advisers might have let stand the instructions they had given General Beauregard on April 8, after hearing word of the expedition: “Under no circumstances are you to allow provisions to be sent to Fort Sumter.” That would have meant that the guns of Charleston Harbor would have waited until a vessel carrying the American flag had actually steamed into the harbor before opening fire. That would have meant, on the negative side, that they fit the picture that Lincoln kept drawing and underlining: “firing upon bread.” But at least they would then have been firing in response to an overt act from the other side—the entrance of the provisioning boat into the harbor they claimed as their own. Obviously it is much easier to convince the world that the other side has committed “aggression” if there is a
n unmistakable overt act.
The Confederate authorities in Montgomery instead notified Beauregard that he should demand the evacuation of the fort and, if that should be refused, “reduce” the fort. Reduce it he did.
I HAVE THE HONOR TO BEGIN BOMBING YOU
THERE FOLLOWED A SEQUENCE of supremely proper messages back and forth between Beauregard and Anderson—the utter propriety perhaps increased by the fact that Anderson had been Beauregard’s teacher at West Point, and that both were Southern gentlemen (Anderson from Kentucky). Anderson responded to Beauregard’s courteous demand that he leave the fort with this doubly courteous response:
Fort Sumter, S. C., April 11, 1861.
General:
I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication demanding the evacuation of this fort, and to say, in reply thereto, that it is a demand with which I regret that my sense of honor, and of my obligations to my Government, prevent my compliance. Thanking you for the fair, manly, and courteous terms proposed, and for the high compliment paid me,
I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
Robert Anderson,
Major, First Artillery, Commanding.
These messages would usually begin “I have the honor to receive your communication” and would then include regrets that the writer could not accept the proposal that he had had the honor to receive; they then would close with the routine but under the circumstances somewhat ironical claim to be “respectfully, your obedient servant.” The point to which Major Anderson’s honor would let him go was not quite far enough for Beauregard’s honor to accept. The exchange concluded with this message from Beauregard’s two aides-de-camp, which managed to invoke honor twice in just two sentences.
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.
The Confederate batteries then had the honor to open fire at four-thirty in the morning, and the batteries at Sumter had the honor to return fire beginning at daybreak. After thirty-six hours of an unequal exchange between the guns in the fort and those on shore, and a fire in the fort, there were more “I have the honor” messages, and the garrison capitulated, and Major Anderson accepted the offer of transportation out to the Union flotilla.
Headquarters, Fort Sumter, S. C.,
April 13, 1861—7.5 p. m.
General:
I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication of this evening, and to express my gratification at its contents. Should it be convenient, I would like to have the Catawba here at about nine o’clock to-morrow morning.
With sentiments of the highest regard and esteem, I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant
Robert Anderson
No one had been killed, but the American Civil War had begun.
THE CAUSE OF THE COUNTRY WAS ADVANCED
THERE WAS, in the narrowest sense of sheer physical power, no military stake to either side in holding or not holding Fort Sumter. The fort, even if resupplied with provisions for a time, even for that matter if supplied with more men and armaments, was no military threat to the now well-fortified Charleston Harbor, or to South Carolina, or to the Confederacy; the loss of this fort did not endanger the Union, physically speaking. But one cannot separate the apparatus of physical power from the attitudes of the human beings who apply it. The “symbolic” meaning, the effect, the shadow that the fort cast upon public attitudes—the indications of intent and purpose—was immense.
In Lincoln’s July 4 Message to Congress he described the government’s purpose as “to maintain visible possession” and the rebels’ purpose as “to drive out the visible authority,” and he said that these competing visibilities carried with them the fate of the Union:
They knew that this Government desired to keep the garrison in the Fort, not to assail them, but merely to maintain visible possession, and thus to preserve the Union from actual, and immediate dissolution…and they assailed, and reduced the Fort, for precisely the reverse object—to drive out the visible authority of the Federal Union, and thus force it to immediate dissolution.
And the rebels did fire the first shot.
[T]he assailants of the Government began the conflict of arms, without a gun in sight…save only the few in the Fort, sent to that harbor, years before, for their own protection.
They thereby began the war, which Lincoln’s actions had risked, with the Union itself at stake.
In this act, discarding all else, they have forced upon the country, the distinct issue: “Immediate dissolution, or blood.”
Lincoln claimed success for his Sumter policy in two statements that are often quoted in the windup of discussions of these events. One statement came in a consoling letter to Gustavus Fox and the other in that talk with Orville Browning, recorded in Browning’s diary. Ramsdell interprets Lincoln’s claim of “success” to mean that he managed to start the war while making the rebels take the blame for it. But one may understand Lincoln in a slightly different way, to a quite different appraisal.
To Fox he wrote: “You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumpter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.” Ramsdell asks: “Was this statement merely intended to soothe a disappointed commander, or did it contain a hint that the real objective of the expedition was not at all the relief of Sumter?”
One may answer that the real objective of the expedition was the demonstration of Union resolve by the attempt to relieve Sumter—that objective was accomplished. Depending upon how the rebels responded, the situation contained the further possibility of a Union moral advantage, and they responded so that that possibility was also realized.
Browning got down on paper after he returned to his room what Lincoln had said of the Sumter expedition: “He himself conceived the idea, and proposed sending supplies, without an attempt to reinforce giving notice of the fact to Gov Pickens of S.C. The plan succeeded. They attacked Sumter—it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.” Ramsdell treats this quotation from Browning’s diary as conclusive: “It completes the evidence.”
Ramsdell assumes that the usually shut-mouthed Lincoln, secretly proud of what he had brought off, had in this relaxed meeting with an old friend revealed his true purpose, unaware that Browning would write it down when he got back to his room. Perhaps that assumption has a modicum of truth. But again there were layers to Lincoln’s success. The first was simply to move the dilemma from his own shoulders to theirs. Sumter being provisioned and continuing as a visible symbol of Union resolve, flying the American flag in the harbor of the fiercest rebels, would have been another kind of success. But the attack “without a gun in sight” did something else: it abruptly unified the North and generated a huge desire to put down this rebellion. We may take Lincoln’s phrase and say that the “cause of the country” was advanced.
Nicolay and Hay did not stint in their praise for their chief in this first great encounter. They would write, looking back in 1888 to the moment he sent the Sumter expedition:
When he finally gave the order that the fleet should sail he was master of the situation; master of his Cabinet; master of the moral attitude and issues of the struggle; master of the public opinion which must arise out of the impending conflict; master if the rebels hesitated or repented, because they would thereby forfeit their prestige with the South; master if they persisted, for he would then command a united North.
They did persist, and he did command, for a time, a united North.
CHAPTER FOUR
On Not Mastering the Situation
; The Comedy of the Powhatan
NOT ALL THE EARLY undertakings of the Lincoln administration showed such mastery: the story of the Powhatan shows something else. We tell it partly because it has not been often told; partly because it shows the president making a big mistake; and partly because it shows how he handled it and learned from it.
The USS Powhatan was a 2,415-ton side-wheel steamer built in the Norfolk Navy Yard in 1852, named for the famous Indian chief who had ruled the coastal area of Virginia at the time Jamestown was settled. (Americans had a certain romantic inclination to give their warships Indian names. At one point in the spring of 1861 the U.S. Navy had only three active warships in Atlantic waters, and their names were the Pocahontas, the Pawnee, and the Powhatan.) The Powhatan, which had been the flagship of Commodore Matthew Perry in Japan eight years earlier, carried the most powerful weapons and was the most formidable of the small American navy’s warships available for duty on the East Coast.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 9