One may measure what the president might have done by noticing how his wounded cabinet members felt about it.
The secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, and the secretary of war, Simon Cameron, just six weeks into their new jobs, were incensed at the utter irregularity of that expedition that had been kept secret from them and at the role of men nominally under their authority. According to Welles, Cameron thought that Seward, trying to run the War Department, had caused Captain Meigs to desert, that Meigs was absent without leave and expending military appropriations without authority from the secretary of war, and that he—Cameron—would have Meigs arrested and tried by court-martial.
Did the president share in this indignation? No, Lincoln not only held no grudge against Meigs but that very summer went out of his way, overcoming Secretary Cameron’s resistance, to obtain for him an enormously important post: quartermaster general. Meigs went on to become an important figure in the Civil War, calculating accurate estimates of Confederate armies when General George McClellan was giving inflated estimates and then organizing extraordinary feats in transporting Union armies. He would be present at Lincoln’s deathbed and would serve on as quartermaster general for decades after the war.
Welles had complaints about Porter of the navy like those of Cameron about Meigs of the army. “Although Lieutenant Porter had gone with the Powhatan to Pensacola, there was no order or record in the Navy Department. He was absent without leave; the last sailing orders to the Powhatan were [sent by Welles himself] to Mercer. The whole proceeding was irregular and could admit of no justification without impeaching the integrity or ability of the Secretaries of War and the Navy.” And Andrew H. Foote, who had been tugged one way and then another by the telegrams to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, when he learned the whole story said to Porter: “You ought to have been tried and shot.”
But Porter was not tried, not shot, not reprimanded, and like Meigs he went on to a distinguished career. He stayed for six weeks in Pensacola but later played a major role in the battle for New Orleans, at Vicksburg, and at Fort Fisher. His career was given a huge boost by President Lincoln in the late summer of 1862, when Lincoln was looking for a commander of the Mississippi squadron who would cooperate with the army and had some dash. Welles gave Porter a desk assignment, but Porter went to see the president to try to get assigned to active service. Lincoln had not seen him since the Powhatan caper and might have been expected to have some resentment about it. But no—Lincoln questioned Porter about the operation on the Mississippi, and the battle for Vicksburg, and was impressed. A few weeks later Porter was promoted all the way to acting rear admiral, an enormous step, jumping over numerous officers with superior claims. He was a key figure cooperating with Grant in the capture of Vicksburg. Near the end of the war, in a conference made famous by a distinguished painting, the Union leaders conferring about the ending of the war are Lincoln, Grant, Sherman—and Rear Admiral David D. Porter. By that time, the April night four years before on which he had insisted on taking over the command of the Powhatan from Captain Mercer must have faded into a distant memory. Certainly it had for the president.
And what of Gustavus Fox—not a perpetrator but a victim? Far from being the butt of ridicule, despite the fizzling of his Sumter plan, he would go on to have a distinguished career in the Navy Department throughout the war. Much of the credit for the rapid improvisation of a Union navy, and for that navy’s successes, belonged to Fox, who had had a prior career in the navy that Welles had not.
Nevertheless, Fox did not completely wipe from his mind his memory of those hours out there ten miles from Charleston Harbor waiting for the Powhatan to show up.
Sooner than one might suppose—May 1, only two weeks after Sumter’s fall, while overwhelmed with other events—President Lincoln did find time to write a consoling letter to Gustavus Fox, making the important interpretation of the whole Fort Sumter event that we have quoted in the previous chapter.
President Lincoln, after saying the expedition’s failure was not at all Fox’s fault and was to some extent his, was careful to give the disgruntled Fox a solid personal endorsement: “For a daring and dangerous enterprise, of a similar character, you would, to-day, be the man, of all my acquaintances, whom I would select.” And then Lincoln wrote a last paragraph that is often quoted as his appraisal of the entire Sumter undertaking. He joins Fox and himself, generously, in mutual anticipation of the effort (“you and I”) and finds it to have been a success by the larger criterion of advancing “the cause of the country”:
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.
Very truly your friend,
A. LINCOLN
Finally, Seward. Another leader would have found Seward’s conduct in this affair hard to forgive. It was the culmination, indeed, of a number of episodes that had occurred since Seward’s bitter defeat by Lincoln in Chicago. But Lincoln, generous and clearheaded, realized that he needed Seward—needed him for his following, for his reputation, and, despite what Lincoln might have concluded from this episode, for his experience and advice. Before many more weeks were out, Seward would be writing to his wife, Frances, about Lincoln’s executive skill. And by the time his four years were over, Seward would have become Lincoln’s closest friend on the cabinet, and a great admirer.
The firing on Sumter, the evacuation of Sumter, and the president’s call for troops—the beginning of the Civil War—so thoroughly changed the subject and the atmosphere as to sweep everything else aside and send an electric charge of Union sentiment throughout the North. So retrospectives on the Powhatan caper, and the recriminations it provoked, were altogether upstaged by vastly larger events. And President Lincoln, who would show a distinct ability to concentrate on what was essential, would put it aside entirely.
CHAPTER FIVE
Days of Choices
Two April Sundays
ALTOGETHER NEW to the highest level of national decision-making, indeed to executive responsibility of any kind; wearied by the pressure of reporters and visiting politicians in Springfield and by an exacting trip from Springfield to Washington; embarrassed by a dark-of-night skulking entrance into the capital city; exhausted by ten crowded preinauguration days in the Willard Hotel; stunned by an altogether unexpected bombshell of a message in the first minute of his presidency; harassed in every working hour, and some nonworking hours, by long lines of office-seekers outside his door, the novice president Abraham Lincoln gathered himself, in the days of March and the first weeks of April, to make the weightiest turning-point decisions in the history of the American republic since the Founding.
Sunday, April 14, 1861, was a day of enormous decisions. Sunday, April 21, was another.
I HAVE SAID WHAT I WOULD DO
WHEN ON THE MORNING of Saturday, April 13, news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter tapped in on the wire at the War Department, Lincoln had occasion to write a revealing paper announcing the shape of the new policy.
As it happened, a committee from the Virginia convention that was considering secession was scheduled to meet with him that day. The Virginians asked about the “policy which the federal executive is to pursue in regard to the Confederate states.” Lincoln answered: I have already told you what I will do. As in his response to his secretary of state twelve days earlier, so now to this delegation of Virginians teetering on the brink of secession, he said: Read my inaugural address.
One can almost detect a little pout that the Virginians had not sufficiently consulted that address: “It is with deep regret, and with some mortification, I now learn, that there is great, and injurious uncertainty in the public mind as to what that policy is and what course I intend to pursue…I commend a careful consideration of the whole document…[I]t is now my purpose to pursue the course marked out in the inaugeral [sic] address.” He quoted th
e inaugural paragraph about using his power only to “hold, occupy, and possess” federal property and places—that is, places already held—but he also made explicit his underlying position: “I scarcely need to say that I consider the Military posts and property situated within the states, which claim to have seceded, as yet belonging to the Government of the United States, as much as they did before the supposed secession.”
But the promises in his address were conditional, of course. The news of the bombardment of Sumter was sizzling through the telegraph wires. In the first paragraph of the statement to the Virginia committee, he wrote of “not having, as yet seen occasion to change.” But in the second paragraph, almost as though the ground were shifting under his feet, he indicated a change caused by events:
If, as now appears true, in pursuit of a purpose to drive the United States authority from those places an unprovoked assault has been made upon Fort Sumter, I shall hold myself at liberty to repossess, if I can, like places which had been seized before the Government devolved upon me.
The rebels, by their action, had released him from the self-limiting pledge in his inaugural address: he now was at liberty to repossess, if he could, all those forts and mints and arsenals the rebels had seized.
And then he made explicit his intention (quite in contrast to Buchanan) to repel the attack: “And in every event I shall, to the extent of my ability, repel force by force.”
The precision with which he interpreted his inaugural promises is indicated by a little dialogue with himself, in his statement to the Virginians, about what he would do “in case it proves true that Fort Sumpter has been assaulted”: “I shall perhaps cause the United States mails to be withdrawn…believing that the commencement of actual war against the government justifies and possibly demands this.” At the end of this statement, when he insisted that he was not repudiating but was reaffirming the whole of his inaugural address, he scrupulously added the words “except so far as what I now say of the mails may be regarded as a modification.” He was being careful to keep intact the moral charter of his inaugural, altering it only as events warranted, carefully noting when and why he was doing so.
But the days when the U.S. mail would be delivered in the Deep South were over.
IN VIRTUE OF THE POWER VESTED IN ME
ON SUNDAY MORNING, April 14, the news came that after thirty-six hours of bombardment Major Anderson and his garrison had capitulated and were even then being evacuated. After attending the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in the morning, Lincoln met at the executive mansion with the cabinet and his military advisers.
We may picture him there, still new by the calendar although suddenly matured by six weeks of impossibly concentrated history-turning decisions on every day of his presidential life, talking perhaps to advisers—to whom on Inauguration Day he had been a stranger—and then sitting down at his desk with his pen and writing out the proclamation that would summon the militia.
General Scott had mentioned in a memo on April 5 the 1795 Militia Act, which had been passed at the time of George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion. Lincoln must now have had a copy of that act with him, because he found in it both his legal justification and his language. Lincoln took from that act the phrase describing the condition making his action necessary: the obstruction in seven states (which he named), by “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” of one of the constitutionally specified, sworn duties of the president, that he “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Execution of the laws was being obstructed not by the states as such—Lincoln did not recognize their supposed secession—but by these “combinations” in those states. And the Militia Act would provide the legal ground for the president to call the state militia into federal service.*16 Many of the actions Lincoln would now take would have no legislative sanction, but the first one did: calling into service “the militia of the several states of the Union, to the aggregate number of seventy-five thousand.” The Constitution gave the executive that power; the Militia Act specified the conditions.
His decisions of that April Sunday afternoon defined the crisis as an immense insurrection, called forth the military force to suppress it, and implicitly defined his own role of command. His secretaries made a point that the proclamation was “drafted by himself,” copied on the spot by his secretary, concurred in by his cabinet, and signed “and sent to the State Department to be published in the next day’s papers.”
It would later be said that 75,000 soldiers were far too few, and indeed before three weeks had passed, the president would be issuing calls for an increase in the regular army and navy, and for subsequent increases that would dwarf this initial call. Who could have known, on that first afternoon, that before this terrible war was over 2.1 million men would have served in the U.S. armed services?
On the evening of this Sunday, April 14, Lincoln’s old rival, the leading war Democrat Senator Stephen Douglas, came to the executive mansion and held a remarkable private interview that lasted almost two hours. He gave Lincoln his full support and said he should have called for 200,000 troops. Nicolay and Hay noted that 75,000 was already almost five times the then-existing force; that supplies and arms for a larger force were not available; that recent government loans had been discounted; and “that the loyal states had suffered the siege of Sumter and the firing on the Star of the West with dangerous indifference.” The two secretaries then added this striking sentence: “Twenty-four hours later all this was measurably changed.” By Monday evening they would know that for opinion in the North the firing on Fort Sumter would be like the breakup of a great dam, through which torrents of passion now cascaded.
OFTEN AT THE OUTBREAK of a long-anticipated war, the populace feels a profoundly perilous but nevertheless invigorating shot of clarified resolve, and offers up a “vast human sigh of relief.”
There is also often, in countries well supplied with invidious national pride (as what country is not?), an eruption of stereotyped contempt for the enemy-to-be, a pseudo-confident boast, filled with national egotism and swagger and disdain, that one’s own armies will quickly dispose of the despised other. Across the American South there would be much swaggering and invidious contrasting of the fighting capacity of the clerks and accountants of the moneygrubbing Yankee North with that of manly Southern farmers, hunters, and horsemen.
And how then was it, in this first moment of the American Civil War, in the executive mansion itself? “While discussing the proclamation, some of his advisers made a disparaging contrast of Southern enterprise and endurance with the Northern.” Lincoln’s secretaries surely were in the room and reported what they heard. They put Lincoln’s response to “this indulgent self-deception” in quotation marks:
We must not forget that the people of the seceded states, like those of the loyal ones, are American citizens, with essentially the same characteristics and powers. Exceptional advantages on one side are counter-balanced by exceptional advantages on the other. We must make up our minds that man for man the soldier from the South will be a match for the soldier of the North and vice versa.
In calm years later critics looking back would chastise Lincoln for setting the date when Congress would assemble in special session as late as ten weeks from the date shots were fired and the war begun. Could he not have called the people’s representatives much sooner than July 4? Why did Lincoln allow so long a period in which he alone, or the executive branch alone, made the decisions?
There are reasonable answers to these not unreasonable questions. Elections for Congress were impending, and they were critical. The delicate issue of whether the border states would remain loyal, and which ones, was still unresolved, which would affect the composition of Congress. But the decisive consideration was a restriction built into the 1795 Militia Act: the law authorized the service of the militia only for thirty days after the start of the next congressional session—so the earlier Congress returned, the earlie
r the service of the thirty-day soldiers would have to end.
NOT GOOD DAYS FOR POETRY
ALMOST EVERY DAY during the avalanche of events in the April fortnight following the fall of Sumter, Lincoln heard good news and bad news. But the good news came from a remote and inaccessible distance, often only by rumor, while the bad news was at his doorstep, and unmistakable.
In the North—so it was reported—there was a tremendous outpouring of patriotism; of rallies, cheers, and parades; of support for the war; of volunteering far beyond the quotas for the states. Every governor of a free state sent an enthusiastically positive response to Lincoln’s call for troops.
But in Washington that fervent activity in the North was mostly a distant report, while the threat to the nation’s capital was real and immediate. The Founders in their wisdom had planted the nation’s capital in the foggy bottom of a swamp in between two slave states; in April 1861 it surely must have seemed that they should have left it in Philadelphia. If slave state Maryland joined slave state Virginia in the rebellion, then Abraham and Mary Lincoln might soon be scurrying from the nation’s capital the way James and Dolley Madison did when the British burned the White House in 1814. In a gush of initial enthusiasm the Confederate secretary of war had all but officially predicted that the Confederate flag would fly over the Capitol in Washington by May 1.
On April 17 Virginia made the not-so-secret secret decision to join the rebellion. Ex-governor Henry Wise, the rascal who more than two decades earlier had traded verbal blows with John Quincy Adams in the gag rule fight over antislavery petitions in the House of Representatives, and who more recently as governor of Virginia had signed the death warrant for John Brown when the old fanatic was hanged, now in his eagerness announced in the Virginia secession convention that the state’s militia was already moving on Harpers Ferry and also on the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, the nation’s prime shipbuilding base. After Virginia’s decision, occupants of the White House could look out the window and see a Confederate flag flying in Alexandria, across the Potomac.
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