Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  This gave little quiet to Southern jitters because, as president, Lincoln had no authority to interfere with slavery anyway; slavery was a matter of state statutes and state enactments, and while the Constitution obliquely recognized slavery’s existence, it gave it no explicit guarantees, either. Lincoln was, in effect, promising not to do what he had no power to do anyway. At the same time, Lincoln made it plain that he would never countenance the extension of slavery into the territories. Territorial governments, which Lincoln insisted fell under the jurisdiction of Congress no matter what the dictum of Roger Taney, were hereby served notice that applications for statehood that legalized slavery would get no backing from him and no appointees who would oil slavery’s wheels. “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” Lincoln wrote on December 10. “If there be, all our labor is lost, and ere long, must be done again.” He was certainly not about to retreat to some form of the popular sovereignty doctrine in the territories in order to pacify Southern threats of disunion. “I am sorry any Republican inclines to dally with Pop. Sov. of any sort,” Lincoln wrote to the Indiana Republican chairman on December 18. “It acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty, and surrenders all we have contended for.”72 Beyond his promise to leave slavery alone in the slave states, Lincoln would make no further concessions.

  This could have been read as Lincoln’s admission that direct intervention in the slave states was out of the question, a hint he hoped Alexander Stephens and other Southerners would take to their comfort. But such an admission, however significant in Republican eyes and disappointing to the abolitionists, fell considerably short of the reassurances about a slave code and a reopened slave trade that the South was now demanding in what amounted to the final round in the forty-year-long game of balances. Exclusion of slavery from the territories meant that slave-based agriculture had no future, and since the states that would one day be formed in the territories would now be free states, then no matter what Lincoln’s assurances for the present about slavery and the Constitution, the mounting number of free states in the Union would eventually permit the Republicans to create and adopt amendments to the Constitution for abolishing slavery outright, and get them ratified by an ever-increasing free-state majority.

  This, at least, was the logic of the calmest slaveholders. Other Southerners, convinced that the spirit of John Brown was now about to take up residence in the White House, reached for the weapon they had so often threatened to use: unilateral secession from the Union. Within twenty-three days of Lincoln’s election, five Southern states—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida—had authorized the calling of state conventions to debate withdrawal from the Union, and Louisiana’s legislature was in special session in order to call such a convention. In Texas, only the stubborn opposition of Governor Sam Houston kept the legislature from calling for a secession convention, and not even Houston would be able to stave off that demand forever. Even before his state convention met, Alabama’s Governor Moore mobilized the state militia, then pressured Alabama banks into suspending payments of hard cash (mostly owed to Northern banks) and made them guarantee at least $1 million in their vaults for the use of the state. Georgia governor Joseph Brown asked the Georgia legislature for $1 million to purchase weapons for the state and ordered the Georgia militia to occupy Fort Pulaski, a federal fort at the entrance to the port of Savannah.73

  Leading all of the Southern states in secession fervor was South Carolina, whose grievances with the Union ran all the way back to the Nullification Crisis of 1832. Moreover, South Carolina was home to some of the most radical and eloquent voices for disunion, and they made themselves heard when the South Carolina secession convention assembled on December 17, 1860, in Columbia. After deliberating for two days, the entire convention shifted to Charleston and there, at 1:15 pm on December 20, the South Carolina convention unanimously passed a secession ordinance and declared that South Carolina had resumed its status as an independent republic.

  In a document drafted by one of the most passionate of the South Carolina disunionists, Robert Barnwell Rhett, the convention rejected any notions that it was perpetrating a treasonous revolution. Instead, it asserted the provisional nature of the Union and insisted that it was simply taking back, by means of a convention, the same powers it had temporarily surrendered by means of a similar convention in 1787, when South Carolina ratified the federal Constitution. As for the possibility that the federal government might do as Andrew Jackson had done in 1832 and treat the secession as an armed insurrection, South Carolinians sniffed in contempt. South Carolina senator James Chesnut even offered to drink all the blood that would be shed in any war over the Union. From New Orleans, J. D. B. DeBow assured the readers of his Review that Northerners would turn out to fight each other more eagerly than they would fight the South over secession. In the North, “people have no opinions or objects in life in common. So soon as the war with the South is concluded, it is probable she will be dismembered and split up into three or four independent states or nations.”74

  South Carolina’s boldness carried the other states of the Deep South before it. Mississippi passed its own ordinance of secession on January 9, 1861, with Florida adopting a secession ordinance the next day, Alabama the day after that, and Georgia on January 19. On January 26, Louisiana followed suit, and Texas joined them on February 1. In less than the short space between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, seven states had declared their union with the United States dissolved, convinced not only that the political situation of the South required disunion but also that the legal and cultural situation of the Union itself permitted it. The Augusta Constitutionalist explained that “the difference between North and South” had been “growing more marked for years, and the mutual repulsion more radical, until not a single sympathy is left between the dominant influences in each section.” Now that the national government has fallen into the control of the Republicans, “all the powers of a Government which has so long sheltered” the South “will be turned to its destruction. The only hope for its preservation, therefore, is out of the Union.”75

  Yet the secessionists were not nearly as sure of themselves as their pronouncements implied. “A new confederacy, if the present Union be dissolved, it must be conceded, is a necessity,” advised the New Orleans Daily Picayune even before South Carolina had seceded. “The history of the world proves the failure of governments embracing very small communities.” The brave talk about the irreconcilable differences of North and South and the painlessness of secession notwithstanding, the South Carolinians immediately began casting around for support from their fellow Southerners. It was impossible to be sure how the federal government would actually respond; what was more, the elections of delegates to the various state secession conventions had given an uncertain sound to the enthusiasm of the Southern people for the secession movement. The Mississippi secession convention had voted strongly for secession but had also passed a resolution against reopening the African slave trade; the Alabama convention voted for secession by a bare majority of eight; in Georgia, it took ballot rigging by the secessionist governor, Joseph Brown, to ensure that enough pro-secession delegates would be elected to the secession convention. Standing alone, the seceding states might not be able to contain the forces they themselves had set loose, and as Hugh Lawson Clay of Alabama warned, something might “excite the people of N. Ala. to rebellion vs. the State and that we will have a civil war in our midst.” Most significant of all, the upper South and the border states were sitting tight. Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri each called secession conventions, only to have secession resolutions go down to defeat (in Virginia by a two-to-one margin), while North Carolina and Tennessee voted to call no secession convention at all.76

  So on December 31, 1860, in an effort to provide security for the future of the secession movement, the South Carolina secession convention elected commissioners to meet with commissioners from the other secedin
g states with a view toward organizing a cooperative mutual government. On January 3, the commissioners met and discussed their situation, and concluded their deliberations with a call for a general convention of all the seceding states to meet at Montgomery, Alabama, in one month’s time to form a provisional Southern government. The Montgomery convention, assembling on February 4, 1861, took just three days to create a new joint government for the Southern states. They adopted a new constitution, more or less based on the federal Constitution, but adding to the preamble the cautious reminder that “each State” was “acting in its sovereign and independent character.” They chose as the new government’s title (again, to underscore that it was a federation of independent powers and not a national union) the Confederate States of America. Two days later, the convention elected a president for the new Confederacy, the former West Point cadet, secretary of war, and senator from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis. Thus, in short order was born a Southern slave republic—but not without an ill-concealed case of nerves.77

  The worries of the Confederates, however, were nothing compared to the woes of President James Buchanan, who became, in the lame-duck months of his unhappy presidency, the closest thing to an American Job. “Probably the unhappiest man, this day, within the whole limits of the Union, is James Buchanan, the President of these nearly disunited States,” jeered the New Orleans Daily Crescent. “In common with nine-tenths of the people of the North, he has been accustomed to regard the threats of the South as mere idle talk, which really amounted to nothing. He finds out, now, how much mistaken he is.” Wearied to death of the incessant din in Congress and in his own cabinet, Buchanan gradually lost whatever capacity he had to lay out a consistent plan of action and then follow it to the finish.

  He detested the Southern disunionists and utterly repudiated any legal right to secession from the Union. In his annual message to Congress on December 3, 1860, Buchanan warned the South that the Union was more than a “mere voluntary association of states” and could not be “annulled at the pleasure of any one of the contracting parties,” much less because “the election of any one of our fellow-citizens to the office of President” turns out opposite to their inclinations. If so, the Union was indeed “a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States.” Secession “is wholly inconsistent with the history as well as the character of the Federal Constitution,” and therefore what the Southerners were calling secession “is neither more nor less than revolution.” At the same time, he was inclined to excuse the secessionists because of “the long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery”; anyway, he was certain that the Constitution gave him no authority as president to “coerce a State into submission” and back into the Union. The Union “rests upon public opinion,” and if “it can not live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish.”78 As the weeks of his unhappy administration ran out, Buchanan sank further and further into political paralysis, desperately hoping that a crisis could be delayed long enough for him to retire gracefully and turn the government and its problems over to Lincoln.

  Unfortunately for Buchanan, neither the newly triumphant Republicans in the North nor the secessionist fire-eaters in the South were willing to grant him a quiet exit. The Republicans, and especially Lincoln, refused to believe that Southern secession meant anything more than all the other temper tantrums the South had thrown since the Missouri Compromise. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, in a speech to the Senate on January 25, 1860, had heaped contempt on the secession threats as “this DISUNION FARCE,” which was intended only to “startle and appall the timid, make the servility of the servile still more abject, rouse the selfish instincts of that nerveless conservatism which has ever opposed every useful reform, and wailed over every rotten institution as it fell.” Lincoln himself was confidently predicting “that things have reached their worst point in the South, and they are likely to mend in the future.” Part of Lincoln’s peculiar confidence was due to his own overweening certainty that, as a born Kentuckian, he possessed a special insight into and empathy with Southerners. Possessed with this insight, he was sure that Unionism was a far more powerful force in the long run than the apparently illogical rush to secession.79

  Lincoln was not the only Republican floating on a bubble of confidence. “We shall keep the border states,” predicted William H. Seward in February, “and in three months or thereabouts, if we hold off, the Unionists and Disunionists will have their hands on each other’s throats in the cotton states.” William S. Thayer, the assistant editor of the New York Evening Post, noted that “the leading Republicans” were all convinced that “the seceders had no purpose of remaining out of the Union.”80 It was also clear to the Republicans that a stout refusal to yield to Southern threats or accommodate Southern demands was politically useful. The Southern threat of secession gave the Republicans an important issue on which to rally Northern public opinion, even while the threats of disunion divided hesitant Southerners.

  Consequently, neither Lincoln nor the Republicans were going to be at all receptive when Buchanan pleaded for compromises to placate the secessionists and keep the Union together. In his December 3 message to Congress, Buchanan had called upon Congress to work out a series of compromises that would take the wind out of the secession-mongers’ sails, including a constitutional convention that would consider an amendment to protect slavery in the territories and the purchase of the Spanish colony of Cuba in order to admit it to the Union as a slave state. These proposals were hardly the sort to please either Northern Democrats or Republicans, but they might have forced the secessionists to back down long enough to let the storm over Lincoln’s election die down. Similarly, a constitutional convention might have been just the instrument to reawaken national interest and loyalty in the South. Congress grudgingly formed two committees, one each for the House and Senate, to discuss Buchanan’s proposals for compromise, and by the end of December the Senate Committee was ready to put forth a compromise proposal that had been drafted by John J. Crittenden of Kentucky.81

  The Crittenden Compromise actually called for not one but a series of constitutional amendments that guaranteed the following: the old Missouri Compromise line of 36°30′ would be revived and slavery would be forbidden in any state or territory north of the line and protected anywhere to the south; slavery in the District of Columbia was to be protected from congressional regulation; Congress would be prohibited from interfering in the interstate slave trade; and Congress would compensate any slave owner whose runaways were sheltered by local Northern courts or anti-slavery measures.

  Crittenden seriously believed that his compromise could win popular support, and he even urged Congress to submit it to a national referendum. Lincoln, who refused to believe that the secession threats were finally serious, would have none of it. “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery,” Lincoln wrote on December 11. “The instant you do, they have us under again. … The tug has to come & better now than later.” At Lincoln’s cue, the Republicans in Congress gagged on Crittenden’s guarantees for the extension of slavery into the territories, and on January 16 they successfully killed Crittenden’s compromise on the floor of the Senate by a narrow margin, just five votes.82

  In all fairness to Buchanan, the compromise plan had not necessarily been a bad idea in political terms, and in February a mostly Democratic “peace convention,” with delegates from twenty states and chaired by no one less than ex-president John Tyler, attempted to revive the Crittenden proposals. But Buchanan had lost the will and the political force that had enabled him to carry the Lecompton constitution through an unwilling Congress in 1858, and so his efforts at compromise, sincere but halfhearted, died wordlessly on his own goal line. Republican intransigence was hardly Buchanan’s only problem. Buchanan might have found secession a little more tolerable, or at least a little more ignorable, if the s
ecessionists had not themselves kept pushing on what was, for Buchanan, a particularly touchy question of honor: the disposition of federal property in the seceding states. “If a separation had been sought by the slave-holding States… through peaceful means alone, it might have been ultimately conceded by the Northern States,” wrote Buchanan’s secretary of the Treasury, John Dix.83

  The United States government owned and operated a mint in New Orleans, a network of post offices throughout the South, two major arsenals full of weapons, several storage arsenals in major cities, and nine forts—and the secessionists were not willing to leave them alone. Since the employees of the mint, the post offices, and the arsenals were both civilians and compliant Southerners, the seceding states simply appropriated the facilities for their own use before Buchanan or anyone else could have anything to say in the matter. The forts, however, were a different matter altogether. As U.S. military installations, they were garrisoned and commanded by the United States Army. Unless the seceders were exceptionally bold (as at Fort Pulaski) or the federal officers exceptionally unreliable, the seceders would hesitate to risk an armed confrontation with the federal government, and so the forts were left alone. In leaving them alone, the seceders only created trouble for themselves, since the continued presence of the federal government’s authority in these forts only festered in the minds of the secessionists, not to mention discrediting the authority of the movement in the eyes of the other slave states, who still remained undecided about secession. And none of those forts produced more irritation than the three forts that sat quietly brooding over the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.