The next day Lincoln learned that no troops had been landed at Fort Pickens. The president now had Secretary Welles send a special messenger to Pensacola, across land this time, carrying the order, now through the proper navy channels, that the troops from the Sabine should be landed at Pickens. So now at last a strong effort by the government was under way to retain both of the forts still in Union hands. Welles retired to the Willard congratulating himself that the navy was doing its part.
But once again on April 6 Welles’s evening in the Willard was to be interrupted, this time at a later hour. It was after eleven o’clock when Secretary Seward appeared at Welles’s rooms, together with his assistant, his son Frederick. They had in hand the telegram from Captain Meigs in New York saying that his undertaking was being impeded by some new orders that had just come from the secretary of the navy. The Sewards showed Welles the telegram from Meigs, but Welles could not understand what it referred to. Seward explained that it had to do with the Powhatan and Porter’s command. The Powhatan? Porter’s command? What was this all about? Naval Officer Porter had no command—the secretary of the navy surely ought to know. And the Powhatan, said Welles, was the flagship of the Sumter expedition and had just been ordered to a gathering force off Charleston Harbor. Moreover, Meigs was an army officer, not a navy man.
The president had not yet gone to bed when in the middle of the night this crew of government dignitaries appeared at the executive mansion. “On seeing us,” wrote Welles, “he was surprised, and his surprise was not diminished on learning our errand.” Lincoln looked at Seward, looked at Welles, read and reread Meigs’s telegram, then asked Welles whether he might be in error. Welles insisted he was not and reminded him that he had read to Lincoln his orders to Captain Mercer, and that Lincoln had approved. Welles’s telling of the story continues: “He [Lincoln] recollected the circumstance,” Welles wrote, “but not the name of the officer or the vessel—said he had become confused with the names Pocahontas and Powhatan.”*15 Too many ships had Indian names that began with the letter “P.” Welles insisted even at this postmidnight hour on making a trip to the Navy Department next door to the White House to obtain a copy of the order to Mercer.
Welles’s biographer John Niven imagines a little scene there in the president’s office in the middle of the night as this ad hoc group of government figures waited for the agitated Secretary Welles to bustle over to the Navy Department to get the letter he had read to Lincoln just the day before: “Seward, tense and tired, but alert, lounging carelessly on a sofa; young Frederick Seward and Captain Stringham in the background; Lincoln, weary beyond belief, his table cluttered with documents, possibly annoyed by Welles’s sudden departure for proof, yet anxious that there be harmonious relations among members of his cabinet.” We may continue the imagining on our own: the stout, bewigged, bearded Welles, full of righteous indignation, sweeps triumphantly back into the room brandishing the letter he had sent to Captain Mercer and read to the president the previous day. He shows the letter, with grim satisfaction, to Lincoln and squints obliquely over his little glasses at Seward on the sofa. Lincoln, reading the orders to Mercer, now registers the name: Mercer. Yes. Now I remember signing something about a Mercer back on that Monday of many signings, and then Welles yesterday reading his letter to Mercer. Yes, Welles is right.
Lincoln now grasped what a huge error he had made by signing, without reading, the earlier orders that Meigs and Porter—under Seward’s aegis—had concocted in his anteroom on April 1. How was Lincoln going to respond? Reprimands? Self-laceration? Avoidance—it is late; maybe we should sleep on it? What he did was to start right in that instant, in the tired middle of the night, to straighten it out. He turned to Seward and told him that the Powhatan must be restored to Mercer and to the expedition to relieve Fort Sumter; he had not meant to do anything to interfere with the Sumter expedition. It tells us something about Seward’s conception of his role in relation to Lincoln at this point that even in this circumstance—the late hour, his own machinations exposed, and a clear statement by the president—he nevertheless gave an argument. He said it would be hard at this hour to get word through to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Mercer and the Powhatan. And not only that, he tried to argue the merits. The Pickens expedition was the more important, he said, and it would be injured if the Powhatan were withdrawn from it. Lincoln—surely understandably—said he did not want to discuss the matter; Welles used the words “peremptory” and “imperative” to describe Lincoln’s instructions to Seward. Abraham Lincoln, the amiable politician and lawyer from Illinois, had not had many occasions in his life to be “peremptory” and “imperative,” but now he was learning.
For his part, Seward did send a telegram—but perhaps not right away. It did not arrive in Brooklyn until three the next afternoon.
APRIL 6, BACK IN BROOKLYN
WHEN SEWARD’S TERSE TELEGRAM, sent by the president’s “imperative” order, to Porter—“Give the Powhatan to Mercer,” signed just “Seward”—arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Commander Foote, no doubt baffled yet again by the conduct of these new civilian overlords, had a fast tug chartered and sent it after the Powhatan. When the tug overtook the Powhatan and Porter read the message signed just “Seward,” he decided he should ignore it. If his original orders from the president trumped an order from the civilian head of his own Navy Department, they certainly did the same for the head of another department. The Powhatan steamed on toward Pensacola.
FRUSTRATION IN CHARLESTON HARBOR
THE FOUR SHIPS, including the Powhatan, and three tugboats that were to take part in the Sumter expedition as planned by Fox and set in motion by Abraham Lincoln were to assemble in the early morning of April 11 in Charleston Harbor, ten miles east of the lighthouse. But as is so often the case in war, and perhaps peace as well, acts of God and acts of men intervened, preventing that from happening. Only the revenue cutter Harriet Lane came close to carrying out the plan. The chartered steamer Baltic, with Fox on board, ran into a tremendous gale and did not arrive until the early morning hours of April 12. The storm also scattered the three tugs that were to have attempted the delivery of supplies to Sumter. Fox thought he might be able to use the longboats on the Powhatan instead of the tugs—but where was the Powhatan?
In Fox’s report we see the dark comedy of these naval captains, in the heavy sea off Charleston Harbor, discussing their wait for a ship, the Powhatan, which in fact was at that moment steaming south to Florida, and their obligation to an officer, Captain Mercer, who in fact at that moment was back in New York.
They were trying to carry out the plan designed by Gustavus Fox and ordered by President Lincoln.
Fox asked the commander of the Pawnee to join him in the attempt to send in provisions. The captain replied that his orders required him to remain ten miles east of the light and await the Powhatan, and stated that he was not going in there to inaugurate civil war. (But that was being done, at that moment, by others.)
Fox reported:
[H]eavy guns were heard and the smoke and shells from the batteries which had just opened fire upon Sumter were distinctly visible.
Neither the Pawnee nor Harriet Lane had boats or men to carry in supplies. Feeling sure that the Powhatan would arrive during the night, as she had sailed from New York two days before us, I stood out to the appointed rendezvous and made signals all night.
But of course no Powhatan appeared. Fox’s report continues:
The morning of the 13th was thick and foggy, with a very heavy ground swell…An officer of very great zeal and fidelity, though suffering from seasickness…organized a boat’s crew…notwithstanding the heavy sea, for the purpose of having at least one boat, in the absence of the Powhatan’s to reach Fort Sumter.
At 8 a.m. I took this boat, and…pulled in to the Pawnee. As we approached that vessel a great volume of black smoke issued from Fort Sumter, through which the flash of Major Anderson’s guns still replied to the rebel fire. The quarters of the fort w
ere on fire.
And now, at this late moment and in this unlikely place, Fox at last learned about the missing ship and the missing captain:
I now learned for the first time that [the captain of the Pawnee] had received a note from Captain Mercer, of the Powhatan, dated at New York the 6th, the day he sailed, stating that the Powhatan was detached by orders of “superior authority” from the duty to which she was assigned off Charleston, and had sailed for another destination.
This “superior authority” was the president of the United States, whose letters signed unwittingly on April 1 effectively undercut the plan he wittingly ordered four days later.
On the afternoon of this climactic day, the Pocahontas finally arrived. Now there were two U.S. Navy ships with Indian names beginning with “P” ten miles off Charleston Harbor—but neither one, alas, was the Powhatan. Reported Fox: “[A]t 2 p.m. the Pocahontas arrived, and at 2:30 the flag of Sumter was shot away and not again raised.”
Captain Gillis of the Pocahontas wanted to render assistance to the gallant men in Sumter but discovered it was too late. Instead, he received the message from Anderson that they had decided to evacuate the fort and needed transportation:
I…proceeded to Fort Sumter [Captain Gillis reported to Gideon Welles] to offer [the available ships] in person. Found the fort a complete wreck, the fire not yet all extinguished. Its shattered battlements, its tottering walls, presented the appearance of an old ruin…
I remained at Fort Sumter till the little band of patriots had saluted their old flag…and marched out with their tattered ensign to the tune of our own Yankee Doodle.
One may wonder where on a rock in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, on April 14, 1861, the brave men of Anderson’s garrison could find musicians to play “Yankee Doodle” as they marched out of Fort Sumter—and then one looks back to the makeup of the garrison and finds, yes, “8 musicians.”
And so as it turned out, to the intense frustration of Gustavus Fox, the flotilla that President Lincoln had ordered him to put together was to play only one utterly tangential role in the Sumter battle: it provided transportation for Anderson and the garrison after they had been bombarded into submission.
ANTICLIMAX IN PENSACOLA
GUSTAVUS FOX headed north to New York in frustration over his nonparticipation in the events at Fort Sumter; meanwhile, the Powhatan under Porter’s command was heading south in the excitement of anticipated service at Fort Pickens.
Meigs, on the chartered passenger ship the Atlantic, accompanying the Powhatan, wrote, as Richard Current says, “exultingly but cryptically” to Secretary Seward: “[W]hen the arrow has sped from its bow it may glance aside, but who shall reclaim it before its flight is finished?” The president of the United States, at least, had not been able to reclaim this particular arrow.
But while Porter and Meigs and the Powhatan expedition were making their way to Pensacola, the Union messenger, sent on April 6—this time by the swifter overland route, this time with orders from the navy—was at last able to get an order from Washington through to the Union command on the Sabine in Pensacola Harbor. On April 12 the troops that had been there offshore all the time were landed in the fort, which probably was already sufficient reinforcement (more followed) to keep the fort in Union hands throughout the war.
The Powhatan, which finally arrived on April 18, was not at all necessary to that result.
UNHAPPINESS IN CIVIL WAR WASHINGTON
GUSTAVUS FOX, meanwhile, said glumly to Anderson, as they traveled north from Sumter on the Baltic on April 14, that while Sumter’s Captain Anderson would be a hero, he, Fox, would be the goat, a figure of ridicule. He was not pleased with the events in Charleston Harbor:
I do not think I have deserved this treatment…Had the Powhatan arrived the 12th we should have had the men and provisions into Fort Sumter, as I had everything ready, boats, muffled oars, small packages of provisions, in fact everything but the 300 sailors [who were to have been on the Powhatan].
But on that afternoon of Sunday, April 14, while Fox and Major Anderson were steaming north from Sumter on the Baltic and Porter was steaming south on the Powhatan, the overwhelming news of the fall of Fort Sumter swept the country and drove all these preliminary events out of everyone’s mind.
Or almost everyone’s mind. Gustavus Fox remembered. On April 19 he wrote a report in which he noted that a fierce storm on the night of April 11–12 had delayed the rendezvous of his flotilla. But his primary complaint had to do not with acts of God but with acts of man:
I learned on the 13th instant that the Powhatan was withdrawn from duty off Charleston on the 7th instant [actually, the 6th], yet I was permitted to sail…without intimation that the main portion—the fighting portion—of our expedition was taken away.
His many later accomplishments notwithstanding, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Fox apparently still had, even as late as February 1865, a touch of heartburn when he remembered that episode of the Powhatan back at the start of the war. Or maybe he was just tidying the department’s records. In any case, we find him writing this to Nicolay in the White House:
Washington, Feby 22 1865
Dear Sir:
Early in April 1861, the U.S.S. Powhatan, under the command of Lieut. D. D. Porter, was despatched from New York to Pensacola on confidential service. The orders were from the President direct and do not appear in the records of this Department. If there is a record of them in your office, will you be kind enough to furnish a copy for the files of this department?
Very respect &c
G.V. Fox
Nicolay had to answer that he could find no record of that episode from long ago here at the White House. In fact—we may imagine him responding—to tell the truth, we would rather not remember anything about it. Go see Quartermaster General Meigs. Maybe he knows where that order is.
RAPID SELF-EDUCATION IN THE HIGHEST OFFICE
NOW WE COME to the primary purpose for telling this complicated tale: to examine the response of the man putatively at the center, the president of the United States. Lincoln was learning two contradictory lessons about this great office he now held: it was very powerful, and then again maybe it wasn’t.
How would the new president respond to a first-class screwup in his administration? In the first place, Lincoln took his full share of the blame—maybe even a little more than his full share. Welles, telling about that midnight visit to the White House, concluded with this report about the president: “He took upon himself the whole blame, said it was carelessness, heedlessness on his part, he ought to have been more careful and attentive.” Then Welles—writing later, after having served throughout Lincoln’s presidency—generalized: “President Lincoln never shunned any responsibility and often declared that he, and not his Cabinet, was in fault for errors imputed to them, when I sometimes thought otherwise.”
On May 1 after this episode the president would write a consoling letter to the disgruntled Gustavus Fox:
I sincerely regret that the failure of the late attempt to provision Fort-Sumpter should be a source of annoyance to you. The practicability of your plan was not, in fact, brought to a test. By reason of a gale…the tugs never reached the ground; while by an accident, for which you were in no wise responsible, and possibly I, to some extent, was, you were deprived of a war vessel with her men, which you deemed of great importance to the enterprize.
Second, he learned from it. Of course there would be in the immense complexity of the four years of war many mistakes and errors, but Lincoln himself appears not to have done anything quite like this again. He immediately promised Welles that nothing like what had just occurred—bypassing the Navy Department and keeping Welles in the dark—would ever happen again, and Welles later testified that it did not. “Never from that day, to the close of his life,” Welles would write, “was there any similar interference with the administration of the Navy Department, nor was any step concerning it taken without first consulting me.”
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What Lincoln learned went well beyond noninterference with the chain of command in the navy. Not only would he not sign anything he did not understand, or something someone else had written, he himself would compose, in his own careful penmanship, the key presidential and administration orders and public documents, including many signed by others.
Third, as damaging as this episode was, Lincoln blamed no one, reprimanded no one, and fired no one. The staff and the subordinates of those who hold high office are supposed to protect, build up, and help their chief. As Justice Louis Brandeis said one day to his clerk Dean Acheson, after the latter had made an unfortunate mistake, “Your role, young man, is to correct my errors, not to introduce new ones of your own.” Kings in the past, and American presidents in the future, would insist that those under them serve and protect them, in order to preserve the awe or respect in which they are held and thus protect the power of the state. Lincoln, in these first weeks at least, had no such support. On the contrary, one could say he was unmercifully manipulated by his subordinates. All of the principals in this bizarre episode, however—an able group despite this incident—went on to perform prominent roles in the war effort, with Lincoln’s help and support, and he and the nation benefited from their abilities.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 11