On April 18 came the news that soldiers just up the river defending Harpers Ferry had to set the rifle works on fire, and that the attacking Virginia militia had taken over, saved some of the machinery, and shipped it to Richmond to make rifles to shoot Yankees. On April 19 still more shocking news arrived. A mob had attacked the first regiment to head for the nation’s capital, the Sixth Massachusetts. Lincoln’s call had come on Monday the fifteenth; Massachusetts governor John Andrew had been eager to respond, and so had many others in his state. A regiment was mustered on Boston Common on Tuesday the sixteenth, left by train amid cheers with their regimental flag on the seventeenth, and sped past cheering throngs in New England and New York to be greeted with enthusiasm in Philadelphia late on the eighteenth. Then the cheering stopped. In Baltimore on April 19 the regiment met not cheers but rocks and fury. They had to change not only trains but stations, and a mob of Baltimore “rowdies” attacked them as they moved through the city streets, and in the exchanges nine soldiers and twelve civilians were killed, the first casualties of the war. At midnight the mayor and the marshal and the police board, and maybe the wavering Maryland governor, ordered the destruction of the railroad bridges on the only two lines that connected Washington with the North—so the nation’s capital was completely cut off from any railroad connection to that North which (rumor reported) was trying eagerly to give support.
April 19 was not only the day of the Baltimore riot but also the day Lincoln issued a blockade of Southern ports, in response to Jefferson Davis’s invitation to privateers to prey on Union ships. And it was the day that Lincoln learned that Harpers Ferry had been taken, that Gosport Navy Yard could not be saved, and that the Maryland authorities had burned the bridges, thereby cutting railroad connection to Washington.
At some time on this overwhelming day a young woman named Mary Rebecca Darby Smith, who as a friend of President Buchanan had attended the inauguration, managed to get in to see the new president. She got from him this inscription, revealing his state of mind with a somber wit:
White House, April 19, 1861.
Whoever in later-times shall see this, and look at the date, will readily excuse the writer for not having indulged in sentiment, or poetry. With all kind regards for Miss Smith.
A. Lincoln.
Nor would April 20 be a good day for sentiment or poetry. The Pawnee, which on its return from the futile wait ten miles off Fort Sumter had been sent out again to help save centrally important Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, now returned with the word that the yard, betrayed by subordinate officers, was lost. Meanwhile, Lincoln asked Governor Thomas H. Hicks of Maryland and Mayor George W. Brown of Baltimore—summoned them, really—to come by special train to talk about “preserving the peace in Maryland.” Both men were implicated in the burning of the railroad bridges to stop Union troops from coming through, although the wavering Governor Hicks would finally be a Unionist. “Troops must be brought here,” Lincoln told Mayor Brown when they conferred on Sunday, April 21. Brown brought with him a committee, including one ardent secessionist.
We can find the essence of the president’s presentation to the mayor and his committee on Sunday in remarks he made on the next day, Monday, to another visitation from Baltimore, this one unofficial: a band of fifty religious folk brought together by the nascent interdenominational organization the YMCA, with a Baptist preacher as the spokesman. They made their way to Washington to urge the president to recognize the independence of the Southern states and send no more troops through Baltimore. Lincoln’s response captured the quintessence of his understanding of his moral responsibility in this perilous moment. He began with a reprimand, which carried with it his view of the immediate rights and wrongs:
You, gentlemen, come here to me and ask for peace on any terms, and yet have no word of condemnation for those who are making war on us. You express great horror of bloodshed, and yet would not lay a straw in the way of those who are organizing in Virginia and elsewhere to capture this city.
He indignantly rejected what they proposed he do, with a significant reference to his oath:
The rebels attack Fort Sumter, and your citizens attack troops sent to the defense of the Government, and the lives and property in Washington, and yet you would have me break my oath and surrender the Government without a blow. There is no Washington in that—no Jackson in that—no spunk in that.
Other records of what he said—we do not have it in his hand—make this last phrase, instead of “no spunk,” “no manhood and honor” that is the way it is in The Collected Works and in Nicolay and Hay’s account. But the Baltimore Sun for April 23, 1861, according to James G. Randall, reported instead the more interesting phrase, “no spunk in that.” Lincoln’s vigorous moral condemnation of their proposal was that they were asking him to break his oath, and there was no spunk/manhood/honor in doing that, no Washington, no Jackson. Such a betrayal of his oath would violate the standard set by the best past presidential conduct on such a matter.
Then, to this visitation of earnest Baltimoreans, he summarized the situation:
I have no desire to invade the South; but I must have troops to defend this Capital. Geographically it lies surrounded by the soil of Maryland; and mathematically the necessity exists that they should come over her territory. Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air. There is no way but to march across, and that they must do.
Given that essential point, he would be flexible.
But in doing this there is no need of collision. Keep your rowdies in Baltimore, and there will be no bloodshed. Go home and tell your people that if they will not attack us, we will not attack them; but if they do attack us, we will return it, and that severely.
Lincoln did not at that moment yet command any troops to respond with, “severely” or otherwise, but they were rapidly being gathered, so it was reported, up north.
He had occasion to state his distinction between “invading,” on the one hand, and defending what he had to defend, on the other, when he responded two days later to a plaintive note from the distinguished and conservative Maryland senator Reverdy Johnson. Johnson had written of the fear in Maryland and Virginia that Lincoln was going to use the force being assembled for an “invasion” of the states. Lincoln replied to Senator Johnson:
I do say the sole purpose of bringing troops here is to defend this capital.
I do say I have no purpose to invade Virginia, with them or any other troops, as I understand the word invasion. But suppose Virginia sends her troops, or admits others through her borders, to assail this Capital, am I not to repel them, even to the crossing of the Potomac if I can?
Suppose Virginia erects, or permits to be erected, batteries on the opposite shore, to bombard the city, are we to stand still and see it done? In a word, if Virginia strikes us, are we not to strike back, and as effectively as we can?
Johnson thanked Lincoln, and said he now understood and endorsed his position.
Lincoln no doubt had made the same points to Mayor Brown and his associates back on Sunday, April 21, in his insistence that he must have troops to defend the capital. And that geography dictated that the troops must come through Maryland. But beyond that he was flexible about how they made their way. “Troops must be brought here,” he had written to Brown and the governor. “But I make no point of bringing them through Baltimore.” General Scott outlined three routes for troops, two of them—from Harrisburg and by way of Annapolis—that did not involve traversing Baltimore and tempting its rowdies.
Mayor Brown, in the meeting on Sunday morning, April 21, agreed to do all he could to keep the “rowdies” from attacking troops passing through Maryland outside the city, and he and the committee departed, and the president and the cabinet went on to other hugely important matters.
But then the mayor and his group astonished everyone by appearing again in midafternoon, with a telegram saying that there were three thousand Union troops ju
st fourteen miles from Baltimore, at Cockeysville, nearing Baltimore by the Harrisburg route, and that the rowdies were aroused. Mayor Brown and his entourage now indignantly suggested that they had been deceived: while they were conferring with the president, the Union forces had taken advantage of their absence to sneak these Pennsylvania troops almost to Baltimore.
The cabinet and Scott were brought back, and discussion ensued, but the president made a firm decision, reported later by Mayor Brown himself: “The President, at once, in the most decided way urged the recall of the troops, saying that he had no idea they would be there today.” Yet again he would take steps so that even “ingenious sophistry” could not misconstrue his action or intention. Lincoln said: “Lest there should be the slightest suspicion of bad faith on his part in summoning the mayor to Washington, and allowing troops to march on the city during his absence, he desired that the troops should…be sent back at once.”
Desperate as he was and would become for troops to defend his capital, he did not want to seem to have tricked the Marylanders to get them there. He had Secretary of War Cameron order the troops back to York. He had General in Chief Winfield Scott order the Pennsylvania troops to take an ingenious alternative route, by way of steamers on the Chesapeake and Annapolis, that would become famous in Civil War history.
EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES
IN ADDITION TO COPING with not one but two visits by Mayor Brown and his crew, on Sunday, April 21, President Lincoln held an extraordinary meeting with his cabinet, about which we have two later testimonials from participants—one from the president himself, and one from Secretary Seward.
Lincoln had occasion, a little over a year later, in a special message to the House on May 26, 1862, to describe the war’s beginnings:
The insurrection which…aims at the overthrow of the federal Constitution and the Union, was clandestinely prepared during the winter of 1860 and 1861, and assumed an open organization in the form of a treasonable provisional government at Montgomery, in Alabama, on the 18th day of February, 1861. On the 12th day of April, 1861, the insurgents committed the flagrant act of civil war by the bombardment and capture of Fort Sumter, which cut off the hope of immediate conciliation.
President Lincoln then gave this account of the dire situation of the nation’s capital during that first week of war:
Immediately afterwards all the roads and avenues to this city were obstructed, and the capital was put into the condition of a siege. The mails in every direction were stopped, and the lines of telegraph cut off by the insurgents, and military and naval forces, which had been called out by the government for the defence of Washington, were prevented from reaching the city by organized and combined treasonable resistance in the State of Maryland. There was no adequate and effective organization for the public defence. Congress had indefinitely adjourned. There was no time to convene them.
Lincoln then described his own momentous decision, and the moral ground for it:
It became necessary for me to choose whether, using only the existing means, agencies, and processes which Congress had provided, I should let the government fall at once into ruin, or whether, availing myself of the broader powers conferred by the Constitution in cases of insurrection, I would make an effort to save it with all its blessings for the present age and for posterity.
He had another pivotal decision to make. He and his colleagues were now about to take a series of actions for which there was no explicit legal ground. But he appealed to the “broader powers” available in the unique circumstance of an insurrection that threatened the very existence of the nation. Later presidents who would be tempted in times of crisis to take the broadest possible view of the Constitution would invoke Lincoln as a model, but none of them faced the mortal threat to the nation that Lincoln confronted. He faced “a clear, flagrant, and gigantic case of Rebellion,” as he would put it later. He dealt with an “insurrection,” one of the two terms the Constitution names—the other being “invasion”—in its only explicit recognition of emergency powers. These two terms appear in the clause permitting habeas corpus to be suspended when the “public safety” requires it. The Constitution, in this rather indirect way, does recognize emergency situations that require extraordinary action—but it defines them “in exceedingly narrow terms…There have been only two such emergencies since the Constitution was written, and none since 1865.” The altogether extraordinary actions President Lincoln took had a unique justification.*17
Lincoln described that cabinet meeting of Sunday, April 21, 1861, getting the day wrong: “I there upon summoned my constitutional advisers, the heads of all the departments, to meet on Sunday, 20th day of April, 1861, at the office of the Navy Department.” And at that meeting the president, “with their concurrence,” took a long series of actions—obtaining and arming ships, transporting troops and munitions of war, and empowering private individuals in New York to take action and spend money for the “military and naval measures necessary for the defense and support of the government.” They should do this (another passage revealed the conditions that made necessary such extraordinary measures) “until communication by mails and telegraphs should be completely re-established between the cities of Washington and New York.”
It was necessary to empower trustworthy private individuals to take action and spend public money for this further revealing reason:
The several departments of the government at that time contained so large a number of disloyal persons that it would have been impossible to provide safely, through official agents only, for the performance of the duties thus confided to citizens favorably known for their ability, loyalty, and patriotism.
On the day after this meeting in the Navy Department, Monday, April 22, there would come a dramatic illustration of this point as scores of government workers and officers in the armed services, including the commodore in charge of the Washington Navy Yard and much of his staff, resigned, left the city, and headed south.
Another passage from this Lincolnian message still further reveals the moment: “The several orders issued upon those occurrences were transmitted by private messengers, who pursued a circuitous way to the seaboard cities, inland, across the States of Pennsylvania and Ohio and the Northern lakes.” That was the U.S. government, sending its orders to New York by way of secret couriers cutting across the inland states to circle in by the lakes.
Lincoln’s conclusion about these measures is fundamental to his outlook: “I believe that by these and similar measures taken in that crisis, some of which were without any authority of law, the government was saved from overthrow.” That fortnight in April 1861 was the moment when the U.S. government may have been in the greatest peril in the entire sweep of its history down to the present day.
Lincoln’s extraordinary actions in confronting that peril are to be distinguished from those of later presidents who attempt to use him as vindication not only in that the crisis he faced was unique but also in that he never claimed to have a presidential authority going beyond that of Congress: everything he did was subject to congressional approval.*18
In his message to the special session Lincoln would say of these and of actions that would follow that they were “ventured upon, under what appears to be a public demand, and public necessity, trusting, then as now, that Congress would ratify them.” And Congress did.
SEWARD COMPARES IMPORTANT MOMENTS
THE OTHER retrospective account of the events of April 21, 1861, comes from another key participant—Seward. In June 1864 Francis Carpenter was in the White House painting First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln. Seward came up to Carpenter at a reception and said he had told the president that Carpenter’s picture made a false presumption: that the Emancipation Proclamation was the central act, and the end of slavery the central deed, of the administration. But, said Seward, that was not so. Carpenter reported Seward’s words as follows:
Slavery was killed years ago. Its death knell was tolle
d when Abraham Lincoln was elected President. The work of this Administration is the suppression of the Rebellion and the preservation of the Union…Slavery has been in fact but an incident in the history of the nation, inevitably bound to perish in the progress of intelligence. Future generations will scarcely credit the record that such an institution ever existed here; or existing, that it ever lived a day under such a government. But suppose, for one moment, the Republic destroyed. With it is bound up not alone the destiny of a race, but the best hopes of all mankind.
Seward had an occasion which, he said, could serve as a symbol for this deeper significance:
Had you consulted me for a subject to paint, I should not have given you the Cabinet Council on Emancipation, but the meeting which took place when the news came of the attack upon Sumter, when the first measures were organized for the restoration of the national authority. That was the crisis in the history of this Administration—not the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 13