Neither Lincoln nor Carpenter would agree with Seward in his comparative depreciation of the Emancipation Proclamation, but all would agree that this earlier gathering had its central place too. By April 21 Seward was in accord with the cabinet decisions—or the presidential decisions—as he had not been on March 29.
Unless one is painting a distinct symbolic painting, one does not need to choose which is the single most important gathering in Civil War history; of course the events that the several meetings symbolize are closely intertwined. Seward was altogether too blithe about the ending of slavery, but it is nevertheless obvious that without the preservation of the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery would not have happened.
THE GREAT EXODUS
THE UNNERVING ISOLATION of the capital city had the perhaps salutary result of sorting the residents according to loyalty: Monday, April 22, was the day of the Great Exodus—the great exposure, resignation, and departure. Hundreds of government clerks, scores of army and navy officers, dozens of high officials, including justices of the Supreme Court, fled the capital of the government they had sworn to serve and joined with those who would overthrow it.
Robert E. Lee and Winfield Scott, both Virginians and outstanding military leaders, were offered high positions in both of the armies that were forming. Lee, whom Scott had selected in his mind as worthy of the highest command, was unofficially offered the command of the Union army; he conferred with Scott, then tendered his resignation to the U.S. Army. Even before that resignation had been accepted, without any discharge or permission, he was offered and accepted the chief command of the Virginia forces in rebellion against the United States. Meanwhile, a committee of Virginians visited Winfield Scott to offer him the command of the forces of his native state. One who was there making the offer was reported to have said: “General Scott received him kindly, listened patiently, and said to him ‘I have served my country under the flag of the Union for more than fifty years, and as long as God permits me to live I will defend that flag with my sword, even if my own native state assails it.” When a spokesman of the committee began to describe the rewards of wealth and honor that Virginia held out to him, Scott stopped him. “Go no farther. It is best that we part before you compel me to resent a mortal insult.”
Of the 1,080 officers on duty in the U.S. Army when the war started, 313 resigned and, as Lincoln would put it, “proved false to the hand which had pampered them.” There were significant defections in the civilian departments as well; of ninety employees in the War Department in 1860, thirty-four were gone, mostly to join the rebels, by the summer of 1861. For an executive in those first days the worst condition prevailed—not knowing whom one could and could not trust. One of Seward’s motives in keeping Welles in the dark in the Powhatan fiasco was his not trusting the loyalty of Navy Department employees. Gideon Welles would write: “When I took charge of the Navy Department, I found great demoralization and defection among Naval officers. It was difficult to ascertain who among those that lingered about Washington could and who were not to be trusted.”
There were nasty surprises. The commandant of the Washington Navy Yard, and the upper echelon of officers at Gospert, went over to the rebels. One of those who decamped, particularly astonishing and painful to Lincoln, was a Captain John B. Magruder of the First Artillery, assigned by General Scott to play a key role in the defense of Washington; only three days before (said Lincoln) he had given him the most earnest protestations of his loyalty.
In his special message to Congress on July 4 Lincoln made a claim about the split between the loyal and the disloyal in the armed services that is a little hard to believe but that certainly testifies to his democratic understanding. He was arguing that the “plain people” would understand and appreciate that the struggle then beginning was “a people’s contest,” and by way of illustration he said:
It is worthy of note, that while in this, the government’s hour of trial, large numbers of those in the Army and Navy, who have been favored with the offices, have resigned, and proved false to the hand which had pampered them, not one common soldier, or common sailor is known to have deserted his flag.
The…most important fact of all, is the unanimous firmness of the common soldiers, and common sailors. To the last man, so far as known, they have successfully resisted the traitorous efforts of those, whose commands, but an hour before, they obeyed as absolute law. This is the patriotic instinct of the plain people. They understand, without an argument, that destroying the government, which was made by Washington, means no good to them.
THE ISOLATED CAPITAL
FOR FOUR DAYS, from April 21 to April 25, the capital was effectively cut off from the nation it ostensibly governed. The anxiety-ridden population of Washington received its impression of great events by means of rumor. John Hay wrote in his diary: “Any amount of feverish rumors filled the evening…[T]here was a Fort Monroe rumor and a 7th Regt. Rumor and an RI Rumor.”
Troops from the North were indeed landing in Annapolis and, with Yankee ingenuity, fixing the railroad and making their way slowly toward Washington, but the residents of the beleaguered city only half knew that this was so.
Surely if there is one bedrock duty of a chief executive, a head of state, it is to protect against the humiliation of having the seat of government captured. “Day after day prediction failed and hope was deferred; troops did not come, ships did not arrive, railroads remained broken, messengers failed to reach their destination.” Lincoln’s secretaries, attesting to his outward public calm, nevertheless give two famous glimpses of the tension of those days. One was Lincoln’s remark to the Sixth Massachusetts, which had battered its way to Washington: “I don’t believe there is any North. The Seventh [New York] Regiment is a myth. Rhode Island is not known in our geography any longer. You are the only Northern realities.” The other was his plaintive exclamation as he stood alone looking out the window: “Why don’t they come?”
Washington in those April days had something of the aspect of threatened and besieged cities in the fearsome conflicts of other years and other places: families packing belongings, women and children being sent to safer places; prices for essential goods skyrocketing; theaters closing. A pungent symbol of the peril of those days—startling indeed to those who live in the hugely powerful United States of later centuries—is General Scott’s plan for the last-ditch defense of the government if the city were invaded. Perhaps Abraham and Mary would not be fleeing the city like James and Dolley Madison but rather would be holed up in a bunker. Scott had chosen the fine old Treasury Building at 15th and Pennsylvania as the citadel to be surrounded by sandbags, and stocked with pork and beans, with Lincoln and the cabinet in the basement and all available troops concentrated around Lafayette Square.
The available defenders, in these anxious April days, have been described as follows:
[T]he national capital in the first anxious days after Sumter had for its protection one dilapidated fort twelve miles down the Potomac, six companies of regulars, about two hundred marines at the Navy Yard, two companies of dismounted cavalry, and the flatfooted, flatchested, untrustworthy, militia or uniformed volunteers of the district, numbering fifteen companies on April 15 and about twice that number a week later.
A kind of home guard was created from volunteers, given arms and put in the charge of two of the colorful characters then in the city who had had military experience: Cassius Clay of Kentucky, who made a “melodramatic” appearance in the president’s reception room on April 22 with three pistols and an “Arkansas Toothpick” (a bowie knife), and Jim Lane, a notorious leader of the Kansas Radicals. In a surreal moment in the third week of April 1861, Lane’s “Frontier Guard” not only drilled in the East Room of the White House but slept there.
AN ANTIWAR CONGRESSMAN APPEALS TO THE WAR POWER
THE NEW PRESIDENT whose huge April decisions had brought this war footing to the capital was in his own original nat
ure a quite unusually peaceful, uncontentious, unbelligerent man. He himself would remark on the incongruity of his being in this position—“a man who couldn’t cut a chicken’s head off—with blood running all around me.”
When at twenty-three he spent six weeks as a volunteer in the state militia it was some combination of a needed job, a duty, and a lark. Although we are told he was in his secret heart rather proud of his brief and desultory but comradely participation in this most rudimentary exercise of his nation’s armed forces, his public presentation of it was self-mockery.
Lincoln voted against the only war he had ever voted on. He voted against it—and spoke strongly against it, on the House floor as a congressman and in letters home. Back in 1847, when he was a newly elected congressman, he expressed a clear-cut position against President Polk’s presidentially initiated war, and against such a war of choice as an instrument of state policy. He voted with the majority of Whigs to say that this war had been “unconstitutionally and unnecessarily” begun by the president.
To William Herndon, about the more general question of presidents initiating wars, he wrote:
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure…
This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.
He wrote that resolutions endorsing Polk on the war “make the direct question of the justice of the war, and no man can be silent if he would.” Lincoln was not silent; he gave his answer: it was an unjust war.
Thirteen years later the one-term antiwar congressman from the West would himself sit where Polk had sat, and he would make decisions that would shape a war dwarfing Polk’s war, a war that would be more destructive by far than any other in American history for a century and a half.
But in Lincoln’s view this war was vastly different, a war not of choice but of duty, a war not of conquest but of the most quintessential national self-defense. He faced not the opportunity to acquire California but the danger that he would lose the nation. An “attempt to divide and destroy the Union” was already under way when he took office. The functions of the government he had sworn to defend were already suspended in seven states. Federal forts, arsenals, dockyards, and customhouses had been seized and were being “held in open hostility to this Government” for any nation in the world, the forceful seizure of only one of those forts or arsenals by a hostile military force would not only justify but require a forceful response: a war of necessity. He said that “[i]t was with deepest regret that the Executive found the duty of employing the war power, in defense of the government, forced upon him. He could but perform this duty, or surrender the existence of the government.”
FORTUNATELY, in those days in April 1861, the defense of the government did not fall to the ragtag defenders who spent that night in the East Room. The next day, finally, the situation changed. “Those who were in the federal capital on that Thursday, April 25, will never, during their lives, forget the event.” About noon on that day the Seventh New York, having made its way across Maryland with pluck and luck, with its band playing and its flag flying, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. The question of which flag would fly over the Capitol on May 1 had been answered.
CHAPTER SIX
Realism Right at the Border
YOU MAY HOLD political sentiments that spring entirely from the Declaration of Independence, as Lincoln said he did when he spoke in Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the way to being sworn in as president of the United States. You may hold, as he said he did, that the sentiments embodied in the Declaration give promise to all the world that the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. You may testify, as he did in Trenton the day before he spoke in Independence Hall, that you hope to be a humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty and of his “almost chosen people” to advance that great objective. But when you arrive in Washington and actually become president, you find that you are a humble instrument, not to advance the great cause of the equality of all men but rather to keep the slave state Kentucky in the Union. Legend has Lincoln saying, “I hope to have God on our side, but I must have Kentucky.”
Although you may have universal moral ideals as your original and fundamental purpose, what you find yourself dealing with, as an actual head of state in a crisis, are geopolitics, numbers, balances of forces: reading not the Declaration of Independence but a map. With Kentucky gone, the Confederate line would have moved north to the great natural barrier, the Ohio River. With Maryland gone, the nation’s capital would have been surrounded, impossible to hold. With Missouri gone, the Father of Waters would never have flowed unvexed to the sea. If all three of these slave states on the border had joined their fellow slave states in the rebellion, the white population, and the available military manpower of the Confederacy, would have been increased by 45 percent, the manufacturing capacity by 80 percent.
“I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” Lincoln wrote to his friend Orville Browning on September 22, 1861. “Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job of our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”
A prime requirement of worthy statecraft is to discern accurately the shape of the objective situation, and to act on that discernment and not on dreams, imaginings, or ideological prepossessions. “Morality” in statecraft does not lead one away from reality but requires one to attend to it. Lincoln, looking at the map and the numbers, would see a wide band of the United States in which slavery existed as a protected institution yet nevertheless was essential to Union victory over the slavery-based rebellion. This crucial stretch of territory began on the Atlantic with the little slave state of Delaware, stretched through Maryland into the mountains, continued through the western counties of Virginia, followed along the Ohio River through the elongated state of Kentucky to the Mississippi, and then crossed the Great River to the western state of Missouri. This great band of territory was essential not only for the balance of numbers and resources but for transport and access: the Ohio River, the Mississippi River, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad would be indispensable avenues for the Union army that was now being fumbled into existence.
Three of the states had active movements for secession, and all had an internal struggle between rebels and Unionists. These Upper South states had fewer slaves than their counterparts farther south, but they were still slave states, with all the implications for laws, institutions, politics, and local attitudes. There were about 420,000 slaves in the border states that never left the Union.*19 The key to a state’s public opinion on secession was the proportion of slaves to the white population. The larger pattern had been, since the invention of the cotton gin in 1794 and the end of legal transatlantic slave trade in 1808, for the proportions of slaves to decline in the border states and to increase in the Deep South cotton states; there was a drainage southward, a selling down the river of slaves from the border states. “In the four Border States [that were kept in the Union] the proportion of slaves and slaveowners was less than half what it was in the eleven states that seceded.” The correlation of the number of slaves in proportion to whites with opinions about secession applied both among states and within states. Each of these states had internal divisions—areas of concentrations of slavery and areas with few slaves.
The secession of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas left four northernmost slave states still in the Union: Delaware had just 1,798 slaves—only 1.6 percent of the population. The percentages of slaves in the population of the other three states, although well
below those in the cotton states, were significant: 9.7 percent in Missouri, 12.7 percent in Maryland, 19.5 percent in Kentucky. The historian William Freehling has remarked that “the war between the states” was also a war within states, especially border states. Keeping these turbulent places on the Union side required making most careful judgments about when to use and when to avoid military force. Sometimes the presence of Union troops and overt military action would solidify a dominant Union opinion (as in Maryland); in other cases such action might push a touchy, fragile public over into the arms of the secessionists (as it probably would have done in Kentucky). Lincoln had to summon not only a most exacting and well-timed combination of forbearance, tact, and the use of force but also the toleration (or embrace) of some quite irregular proceedings.
A DESPOT’S HEEL ON MARYLAND?
LINCOLN’S COMBINATION of firmness and flexibility was exhibited immediately in the first week, in his insistence that Union troops, unable to burrow or to fly, had to cross Maryland but did not need necessarily to pass through Baltimore. When old General Scott said, “Let them go around,” Lincoln seized that idea, and finally troops did make their way by boat around the Eastern Shore peninsula, then up the Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis, south of Baltimore, and then by foot and railroad across land to Washington, leaving the Baltimore rowdies to simmer down.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 14