In the first days of April, with the Sumter crisis looming, the Powhatan was ordered to proceed to two different destinations at the same time; was put under command of two different officers; and received three successive orders, each one contradicting the last, from three high officials in a row: President Lincoln himself, Navy Secretary Welles, and Secretary of State Seward. The expedition in which it took part was planned by Seward, a total amateur in the art of war, with the help of a captain of the army engineers who had been working on an aqueduct and the expansion of the Capitol building, and a lieutenant in the navy, with perhaps some contribution from the new president, even more of an amateur. The expedition was planned in such secrecy as not to be made known to the two relevant cabinet members, the secretaries of war and of the navy, and plans made by the latter for another expedition, with the president’s approval, were to be wrecked by conflicting orders from the president himself.
WE ARE YET WITHOUT A POLICY
THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING this astonishing episode is that Secretary of State William Henry Seward had his own policy for the looming crisis, and it seemed to him that Lincoln did not. We know that Seward thought Lincoln had no policy because he said so, in a presumptuous little paper he sent, altogether privately, to the president on an extremely busy presidential day, April 1, 1861: “We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either foreign or domestic.” This memorandum urged the president to “[c]hange the question before the Public from one upon Slavery…for a question upon Union or Disunion…from what would be regarded as a Party question to one of Patriotism or Union.” One way to do that was deliberately to get into a war with another nation, a suggestion that Lincoln in his response quietly ignored. But the primary way to shift the question, according to Seward, was for the government to give up Fort Sumter and make the reinforcement of Fort Pickens the symbol of Union resolve.
Seward’s opposition to provisioning Sumter, his insistence that Union troops be withdrawn “forthwith,” was grounded not only in his analysis of the situation but also in the personal stake he had acquired. Every anxious week since South Carolina seceded on December 20, while Lincoln had been out in Springfield, riding the train, speaking hither and yon, meeting people, and editing his upcoming inaugural address in the Willard Hotel, Seward had been in Washington, in the Senate, speaking and acting for the Republicans. Effectively leading the Republicans in Washington, Seward had repeatedly informed the Confederate government, through informal communications to three “commissioners,” that Fort Sumter would be evacuated.
So when, after the March 29 cabinet meeting, Lincoln signed the order setting in motion Gustavus Fox’s preparations for a Sumter expedition, it was a serious blow to Seward’s credibility. Ever the energetic activist, he could at least take steps to set in motion the alternative he much preferred, an expedition to Pickens.
Lincoln immediately wrote his own little paper responding, gently enough, to Seward’s “thoughts.” He denied that the administration lacked a policy; it had the policy that he had stated in the inaugural address, with which Seward had agreed: “I said ‘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.’ This had your distinct approval at the time.” And when that inaugural statement was combined with the order Lincoln gave the first day to the general in chief of the army, it represented precisely the policy in Seward’s present proposal—with just one exception:
[The inaugural statement] taken in connection with the order I immediately gave General Scott, directing him to employ every means in his power to strengthen and hold the forts, comprises the exact domestic policy you now urge, with the single exception, that it does not propose to abandon Fort Sumpter.
On the Sumter-Pickens matter, Lincoln did not agree with Seward’s interpretation: “I do not perceive how the re-enforcement of Fort Sumpter would be done on a slavery, or party issue, while that of Fort Pickens would be on a more national, and patriotic one.” In contrast to Seward, Lincoln saw reinforcing Sumter, with its particular geography and history and symbolic meaning, as vastly the more important. But he assumed that Pickens should and would be held as well.
In the shock of his first day in office, March 5, Lincoln had learned from a note from General Scott not only that Scott believed that Sumter would have to be surrendered but also that this other fort down in Pensacola Harbor in Florida was in jeopardy as well. Lincoln had, in response on that first day, given Scott orally the order of which he now reminded Seward.
Five days into his presidency, on March 9, as we have seen, Lincoln had Nicolay put his order to General Scott in writing: “I am directed by the President to say that he desires you to exercise all vigilance for the maintenance of all the places within the military department of the United States,” in which of course he included Fort Pickens.
Although location and history made Fort Pickens less of a symbol, it was, like Sumter, located on an island in a harbor surrounded by Confederate installations. But by its location, it was easier to defend than Sumter. Not only that, the Buchanan administration, in its brief and evanescent fortnight of fortitude in January 1861, had actually sent reinforcements: two hundred men on the USS Brooklyn. But these troops never landed at the fort because of “some quasi-armistice of the late administration,” as Lincoln would call it, by which it had been agreed that if the United States would not land the troops, the Confederate forces would not attack.
This new president, however, had ordered General Scott to have those troops land and reinforce Fort Pickens. But General Scott sent the orders by the long, slow sea route, so they did not even arrive in Pensacola until the Sumter crisis was almost over. In addition, Lincoln learned that the Brooklyn had moved away from Pensacola to Key West, and so he assumed that his order to land the troops had, as he put it, “fizzled out.” (It turned out, however, that before the Brooklyn left Pensacola the two hundred troops had been transferred to another ship, the Sabine, where they sat afloat in the harbor all through the Sumter crisis.)
MEET CAPTAIN MEIGS, FORTHWITH
LINCOLN, assuming the order to reinforce Pickens had failed, was more than receptive to the idea of sending a new Pickens expedition. Seward had not only argued on behalf of such a mission but had also proposed specifics: “I would call in Captain M. C. Meigs forthwith. Aided by his counsel, I would at once, and at every cost, prepare for a war at Pensacola.”
Right away, on another busy presidential day, March 29, Seward brought Captain Montgomery C. Meigs in person to the White House and introduced him to the president. One might not have thought of Meigs as the man to lead a naval expedition to Florida. He was an army man, a graduate of West Point, and he was a mere captain. Moreover, he was an army engineer. The omnipresent Seward, who knew everybody, knew him as the overseer of construction on the Capitol. But Seward knew also that Meigs had recently visited the federal posts in Florida, including Pensacola, so he knew the territory. And, Seward said—in implied, unkind, and invidious contrast to the old and overweight General in Chief Winfield Scott, and perhaps also to General Joseph Totten, the chief army engineer, another veteran of the War of 1812—the president “ought to see some of the younger officers, and not consult only with men who, if war broke out, could not mount a horse.”
When Lincoln asked Meigs whether Fort Pickens could be held, army man Meigs replied, “Certainly, if the navy would do its duty.” Lincoln then asked him—this man whom he had just met and talked with for the first time—whether he would go down to Florida and secure Pickens. Meigs modestly responded that he was only a captain and could not command the majors down there. Nicolay and Hay report in quotation marks what Seward then said: “Captain Meigs must be promoted.” “But there is no vacancy,” said Meigs, modestly. Seward airily dismissed that objection and told Lincoln that Meigs was the man to undertake this task, making the analogy to William Pitt, when he desired to conquer Canada, s
ending for a young man he had met in London society and telling him to take Quebec.
After questioning and listening to Meigs, Lincoln asked him to make a plan.
To carry out his plan—which, like the plan for Sumter, entailed running a ship past the hostile Confederate batteries—Meigs needed a naval officer with talent and daring. He knew just the man: a close friend of his, David D. Porter. Porter was the son of a naval hero from the War of 1812. He was only a lieutenant and had been unsatisfied with his opportunities in the navy when Seward—at Meigs’s suggestion—selected him for the Pickens expedition.
Seward insisted that the Pickens expedition must be kept secret from the Navy and Army Departments, even from the secretaries of the navy and the army. The Navy Department, in particular, was pockmarked with rebel sympathizers who wouldn’t keep secrets. Nevertheless, the audacious irregularity of this undertaking was breathtaking.
April 1 was the day Lincoln learned that troops had not been landed at Fort Pickens. Also on that day Seward, Meigs, and Porter came to the executive mansion and, in an office next to the president’s, wrote orders for him to sign regarding the developing Pickens expedition. Meigs would say in his diary: “Hard at work all day making orders for the signature of the President” and, specifically, “I sent a despatch to commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard to get the Powhatan ready for sea with least possible delay. This was signed by the President.” Porter was hard at work too, with Seward as the overarching authority for all that they were doing. In two of the most significant of the eight orders signed by Lincoln—the two orders to David D. Porter, one giving him command of the Powhatan and the other giving him instructions as to his course once he would arrive in Pensacola Harbor—the signature of the president was followed by another signature: “Recommended: Wm. H. Seward.”
BEWILDERMENT AT THE WILLARD
THAT VERY EVENING, as Navy Secretary Gideon Welles sat at dinner in the Willard Hotel, the president’s secretary John Nicolay appeared and laid upon his table a package from the president. It had to be important, Welles thought, for Lincoln to interrupt his dinner in this way, and to send the overworked Nicolay. On being opened, the hand-delivered package proved to hold some signed orders from the president dealing with naval assignments—Welles’s own department. The most remarkable of these letters, signed by Lincoln, was addressed to Welles himself and instructed him to make several changes in naval assignments. Welles objected to them all but especially to the reassignment of Captain Silas Stringham, who was directed to proceed “with all possible despatch” to Pensacola to take command of the squadron stationed there. Stringham was a senior naval officer whom Welles had known for years and to whom he had himself already given another, and very important, assignment: heading up the bureau dealing with naval personnel, at the very heart of the Navy Department. Stringham, a knowledgeable navy man, was to be brought on to help the new civilian secretary. Why in the world would he be removed? And still worse, why would he be replaced by the man this order proposed, Samuel Barron, whose loyalty to the Union Welles had reason to doubt? (And before many weeks had passed, his doubt would be vindicated: Barron would join the Confederate navy.)
Welles, sitting at his dinner table in the Willard reading these documents, was stunned. “Without a moment’s delay,” Welles went to see the president at the executive mansion. He found him sitting at his desk alone, writing. Lincoln’s response to the abrupt evening appearance of his bearded secretary of the navy is instructive. “[R]aising his head from the table at which he was writing,” Lincoln is quoted by Welles as saying, “What have I done wrong?”
Welles showed him the most remarkable of the letters, the one ordering the various reassignments in navy personnel. The handwriting in the body of the letter was that of Montgomery Meigs. The postscript was in the handwriting of David D. Porter, the naval lieutenant who was the friend of Meigs. And here they were—Meigs and Porter, under the aegis of Seward, drafting a letter about navy personnel, without even informing, let alone consulting, the secretary of the navy. And the letters bore the signature of Abraham Lincoln.
Reading Welles’s account, one imagines that the president was a little sheepish as he tried to explain to Welles what had happened. Seward had been there that day, Lincoln said, with “two or three young men,” discussing a subject that was a Seward specialty—Lincoln still did not tell Welles that the subject was Fort Pickens—which he, Lincoln, had agreed to, and as it involved many details, he had left Seward to prepare the papers. Lincoln told Welles that he had signed these letters without reading them, “for he had not time, and if he could not trust the Secretary of State, he did not know whom he could trust.” An embarrassed Lincoln told Welles that, despite his signature on the letters, Welles could disregard the orders they contained and not make the reassignments they specified. And Welles, although still astonished by the whole matter, retired, assuming everything had been straightened out.
BAFFLEMENT IN THE BROOKLYN NAVY YARD
IF NAVY SECRETARY WELLES was bewildered at the Willard Hotel in the nation’s capital, Andrew H. Foote was baffled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Admiral Foote, the executive officer of the yard, had received a blizzard of contradictory orders having to do with the warship Powhatan. The first one was a brisk message from Secretary Welles, who, after the cabinet meeting on Friday, March 29—the one setting Gustavus Fox’s Sumter project in motion—had ordered him to “[f]it out the Powhatan to go to sea at the earliest possible moment.” Welles wanted this most important warship to be ready for the Sumter assignment.
But then, only twenty minutes after receiving the message from Welles, Admiral Foote received a telegram giving the same order about the Powhatan, in almost the same language, but this time with a different and astonishing signature:
Washington, April 1, 1861
Fit out the Powhatan to go to sea at the earliest possible moment under sealed orders. Orders by a confidential messenger go forward to-morrow.
Abraham Lincoln.
This development was puzzling, not only because of the redundancy but also because of the irregularity—the president issuing an order directly, without going through the Navy Department.
Although more than a little unsettled, Foote did issue the orders to prepare the Powhatan, which was no small matter. The ship had been undergoing extensive repairs. But under the imperative of these orders Foote set the yard to work nights as well as days to prepare the Powhatan to go to sea.
But then on the next day, April 2, there came a still more disturbing development. An energetic navy lieutenant named David D. Porter burst into Foote’s presence brandishing another astonishing order from the president himself, every line of which was baffling:
Executive Mansion, April 1, 1861
Sir: You will fit out the Powhatan without delay. Lieutenant Porter will relieve Captain Mercer in command of her. She is bound on secret service, and you will under no circumstances communicate to the Navy Department the fact that she is fitting out.
Abraham Lincoln
Foote could scarcely believe that this document was authentic. It was highly irregular to replace a senior officer of much higher rank—a captain, Samuel Mercer—with a mere lieutenant, to bypass channels, and to ignore seniority.
And there was one more mystery: that extraordinary sentence saying, “She is bound on secret service, and you will under no circumstances communicate to the Navy Department the fact that she is fitting out.” What could this mean? Not tell the Navy Department about one of its own ships? When the secretary of the navy had just given him orders about this same ship?
Porter, in recalling these events years later, said that it took three hours to persuade Foote that his orders really came from the president and were not a Southern forgery. Admiral Foote was further astonished that an army man, Montgomery Meigs, joined Porter in the argument, insisting that he too had orders directly from the president, and that in fact he was in charge of the expedition of which the Powhatan was to be a
major part.
Foote was worried enough to send self-protecting messages to Welles. On April 5 he sent a telegram saying that he was executing the governmental orders he had received “from the naval officer as well as the army officer.” Now it was Welles’s turn to be baffled: What army officer? Foote received back a telegram from Welles with another brisk order: “Delay the Powhatan for further instructions.”
Foote’s multiple bafflements and cautions led him to send Welles’s telegram to Meigs and Porter, who were staying at the Astor House in New York City. Porter sent a letter right back to Foote, written at eight in the evening, saying, “I am with Captain Meigs and we are telegraphing to Mr. Seward.” (Again one may note who was regarded as the center of power in Washington.) In any case, he argued, he and Meigs had their orders directly from the president, and the orders of the commander in chief trumped those of a mere cabinet secretary.
Back in Washington, plans for the Sumter expedition were under way. When Gustavus Fox met with Lincoln and Welles to make the final arrangements, Welles proposed adding the powerful warship Powhatan, which he had had the foresight to order prepared for duty. And the Powhatan could carry the three hundred sailors Fox proposed. Fox eagerly accepted the offer of the ship. Secretary of the Navy Welles then sent elaborate orders to Captain Samuel Mercer, commander of the USS Powhatan and also commander of the entire Atlantic naval force, which consisted of the U.S. steamers (in addition to the Powhatan) Pawnee, Pocahontas, and Harriet Lane. The ships were ordered to assemble “off Charleston bar, ten miles distant from and due east of the light-house, on the morning of the 11th inst.” They were to endeavor first to deliver “subsistence” to the garrison in Fort Sumter, and then if that was resisted, to “use [the] entire force to…place both the troops and supplies in Fort Sumter.” Welles read to President Lincoln the instructions to Captain Mercer, and the president approved what Welles had read to him. This moment was to prove critical to what was to follow.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 10