Democrats joined in the eagle-scream of patriotic fury. Stephen Douglas paid a well-publicized national unity call to the White House and then traveled home to Chicago, where he told a huge crowd: "There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots—or traitors." A month later Douglas was dead—a victim probably of cirrhosis of the liver—but for a year or more his war spirit lived on among most Democrats. "Let our enemies perish by the sword," was the theme of
83. CWL, IV, 331–32; Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, 2 vols. (Boston, 1876), II, 433–34; Jane Stuart Woolsey to a friend, May 10, 1861, in Henry Steele Commager, ed., The Blue and the Gray, 2 vols. (rev. and abridged ed., New York, 1973), I, 48; Jacob D. Cox, "War Preparations in the North," in Battles and Leaders, I, 86.
84. Philip S. Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (Chapel Hill, 1941), 207; Strong, Diary, 136; Commager, ed., Blueand Gray, I, 47.
Democratic editorials in the spring of 1861. "All squeamish sentimentality should be discarded, and bloody vengeance wreaked upon the heads of the contemptible traitors who have provoked it by their dastardly impertinence and rebellious acts."85
To the War Department from northern governors came pleas to increase their states' quotas of troops. Lincoln had called on Indiana for six regiments; the governor offered twelve. Having raised the requisitioned thirteen regiments, Ohio's governor wired Washington that "without seriously repressing the ardor of the people, I can hardly stop short of twenty." From Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts came a terse telegram two days after Lincoln's call for troops: "Two of our regiments will start this afternoon—one for Washington, the other for Fort Monroe; a third will be dispatched tomorrow, and the fourth before the end of the week."86 It began to appear that something larger than a lady's thimble might be needed to hold the blood shed in this war.
85. Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York, 1973), 868; Wisconsin DailyPatriot, April 24, 1861, Columbus Daily Capital City Fact, April 13, 1861, in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials, 750, 727.
86. Robert E. Sterling, "Civil War Draft Resistance in the Middle West," Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1974, pp. 15–16; O.R., Ser. 3, Vol. 1, p.79
9
Facing Both Ways: The Upper South's Dilemma
I
The outbreak of war at Fort Sumter confronted the upper South with a crisis of decision. Its choice could decide the fate of the Confederacy. These eight states contained most of the South's resources for waging war: more than half of its population, two-thirds of its white population, three-quarters of its industrial capacity, half of its horses and mules, three-fifths of its livestock and food crops. In addition, men of high potential as military leaders hailed from these states: Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. Jackson, Joseph E. Johnston, James E. B. Stuart, and Ambrose Powell Hill of Virginia; Daniel H. Hill of North Carolina; Albert Sidney Johnston and John Bell Hood of Kentucky; Nathan Bedford Forrest of Tennessee.
The upper South's response to Lincoln's April 15 militia requisition seemed to promise well for the Confederacy. Kentucky "will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States," the governor wired Washington. Tennessee "will not furnish a single man for the purpose of coercion," proclaimed her governor, "but fifty thousand if necessary for the defense of our rights and those of our Southern brothers." The secessionist governor of Missouri hurled the gage at the president's feet: "Your requisition is illegal, unconstitutional, revolutionary, inhuman. . . . Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on any such unholy crusade." The governors of Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas sent similar replies, while the governors of Maryland and Delaware remained ominously silent.1
These references to "our rights" and "southern brothers" suggest the motives that impelled four of the eight states into the Confederacy and left three others with large secessionist minorities. "We must either identify ourselves with the North or the South," wrote a Virginian, while two former North Carolina unionists expressed the view of most of their fellows: "The division must be made on the line of slavery. The South must go with the South. . . . Blood is thicker than Water."2 Newspapers in Tennessee and Arkansas proclaimed that "the identity of object and the community of interest existing in all the slaveholding States must and will unite them." Faced with a choice between "subjugation" and defense of "honor . . . liberty . . . rights," the decision was "as certain as the laws of gravity."3
In the eyes of southern unionists, this tragic war was mainly Lincoln's fault. What the president described in his proclamation of April 15 calling out the militia as a necessary measure to "maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union" was transmuted south of the Potomac into an unconstitutional coercion of sovereign states. "In North Carolina the Union sentiment was largely in the ascendant and gaining strength until Lincoln prostrated us," wrote a bitter unionist. "He could have adopted no policy so effectual to destroy the Union. . . . I am left no other alternative but to fight for or against my section. . . . Lincoln has made us a unit to resist until we repel our invaders or die." John Bell, the 1860 presidential candidate of the Constitutional Union party from whom many moderates in the upper South took their cue, announced in Nashville on April 23 his support for a "united South" in "the unnecessary, aggressive, cruel, unjust wanton war which is being forced upon us" by Lincoln's mobilization of militia.4
1. O.R., Series III, Vol. I, pp. 70, 72, 76, 81, 83.
2. Staunton Vindicator, March 22, 1861, quoted in Donald E. Reynolds, Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis (Nashville, 1970), 196; Wilmington Journal, March 4, 1861, quoted in W. Buck Yearns and John G. Barrett, eds., North Carolina Civil War Documentary (Chapel Hill, 1980), 21; Raleigh Register, May 10, 1861.
3. Nashville Patriot, April 24, 1861, Nashville Republican Banner, May 9, 1861, in Dwight L. Dumond, ed., Southern Editorials on Secession (Washington, 1931), 511, 514; Fort Smith Daily Times and Herald, April 5, 1861, quoted in Reynolds, Editors Make War, 195–96.
4. James G. de.R. Hamilton, ed., The Correspondence of Jonathan Worth, 2 vols. (Raleigh, 1909), I, 143, 150–51; J. Milton Henry, "Revolution in Tennessee, February 1861 to June 1861," Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 18 (1959), 115; Mary E. R. Campbell, The Attitude of Tennesseeans toward the Union, 1847–1861 (New York, 1961), 194.
Such explanations for conversion to secession were undoubtedly sincere. But their censure of Lincoln had a certain self-serving quality. The claim that his call for troops was the cause of the upper South's decision to secede is misleading. As the telegraph chattered reports of the attack on Sumter April 12 and its surrender next day, huge crowds poured into the streets of Richmond, Raleigh, Nashville, and other upper South cities to celebrate this victory over the Yankees. These crowds waved Confederate flags and cheered the glorious cause of southern independence. They demanded that their own states join the cause. Scores of such demonstrations took place from April 12 to 14, before Lincoln issued his call for troops. Many conditional unionists were swept along by this powerful tide of southern nationalism; others were cowed into silence.
News of Sumter's fall reached Richmond on the evening of April 13. A jubilant procession marched on the state capital where a battery fired a hundred-gun salute "in honor of the victory." The crowd lowered the American flag from the capital building and ran up the Confederate stars and bars. Everyone "seemed to be perfectly frantic with delight, I never in all my life witnessed such excitement," wrote a participant. "Everyone is in favor of secession." Citizens of Wilmington, North Carolina, reacted to the news of Sumter with "the wildest excitement," flew Confederate flags from public buildings, and fired salutes to them. In Goldsboro, North Carolina, the correspondent of the Times of London watched "an excited mob" with "flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths, hurrahing for 'Jeff Davis' and 'the Southern Confede
racy,' so that the yells overpowered the discordant bands which were busy with 'Dixie's Land.' " These outbursts were not merely a defensive response to northern aggression. Rather they took on the character of a celebration, a joyous bonding with southern brothers who had scored a triumph over the Black Republican Yankees.5
The Virginia convention moved quickly to adopt an ordinance of
5. Letter from J. H. Baughman of Richmond, April 14, 1861, quoted in Henry T. Shanks, The Secession Movement in Virginia, 1847–1861 (Richmond, 1934), 268n.; J. Carlyle Sitterson, The Secession Movement in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1939), 239; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Fletcher Pratt (New York, 1954), 52.
secession, but not quickly enough for an ad hoc assembly in another Richmond hall that called itself the "Spontaneous Southern Rights Convention." Passions ran high on the streets and in both convention halls. Mobs threatened violence against unionist delegates from west of the Alleghenies. On April 17 ex-Governor Henry Wise electrified the official convention with a fiery speech. He announced that Virginia militia were at that instant seizing the federal armory at Harper's Ferry and preparing to seize the Gosport navy yard near Norfolk. At such a moment no true Virginian could hesitate; the convention passed an ordinance of secession by a vote of 88 to 55.6
Although Wise's announcement was slightly premature, he knew whereof he spoke: he had planned the Harper's Ferry expedition himself. A hard-bitten secessionist whose long white hair and wrinkled face made him look older than his fifty-four years, Wise had been governor when John Brown attacked Harper's Ferry. Perhaps this experience turned Wise's mind to the importance of the rifle works there, one of the two armories owned by the United States government (the other was at Springfield, Massachusetts). Without consulting Virginia's current Governor John Letcher, whom he considered lukewarm on secession, Wise met with militia officers on April 16 to set their regiments in motion for Harper's Ferry and Norfolk. Letcher belatedly approved these moves. On April 18, one day after passage of the secession ordinance, several companies of militia closed in on Harper's Ferry, defended by 47 U.S. army regulars. To prevent capture of the valuable rifle machinery, the soldiers set fire to the works and fled. The Virginians moved in and saved most of the machinery, which they shipped to Richmond, where it soon began turning out guns for the Confederacy.
An even greater prize was the Gosport navy yard, the country's premier naval base and the largest shipbuilding and repair facility in the South. Of the twelve hundred cannon and ten ships there in April 1861, many of the guns and four of the warships were modern and serviceable, including the powerful forty-gun steam frigate Merrimack. Most of the civilian workers and naval officers at the yard were southerners; a majority of the officers would soon resign to join the Confederacy. Commanding the eight hundred sailors and marines stationed at the yard was Commodore Charles McCauley, a bibulous sixty-eight-year-old veteran who had gone to sea before Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson
6. Several delegates who voted No or were absent subsequently voted Aye, making the final tally 103 to 46.
Davis were born. McCauley proved unequal to the crisis posed by several thousand Virginia militia reported to be heading for the navy yard. He refused to allow the Merrimack and the other three ships to escape when they had a chance to do so on April 18. The next day, just before reinforcements arrived aboard two warships from Washington, McCauley ordered all facilities at the yard burned, the cannon spiked, the ships scuttled. Even these unnecessary actions were bungled; the dry dock, ordnance building, and several other structures failed to burn; most of the cannon remained salvageable and were soon on their way to forts throughout the South; the hull of the Merrimack survived intact and ready for its subsequent conversion into the famous ironclad C.S.S. Virginia.
These events occurred before Virginia officially seceded, because the ordinance would not become final until ratified in a referendum on May 23. But the mood of the people predestined the outcome. For all practical purposes Virginia joined the Confederacy on April 17. A week later Governor Letcher and the convention concluded an alliance with the Confederacy that allowed southern troops to enter the state and placed Virginia regiments under Confederate control. On April 27 the convention invited the Confederate government to make Richmond its permanent capital. The southern Congress, tired of the inadequate, overcrowded facilities in Montgomery and eager to cement Virginia's allegiance, accepted the invitation on May 21. When Virginians went to the polls on May 23 they ratified a fait accompli by a vote of 128, 884 to 32, 134.
Virginia brought crucial resources to the Confederacy. Her population was the South's largest. Her industrial capacity was nearly as great as that of the seven original Confederate states combined. The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond was the only plant in the South capable of manufacturing heavy ordnance. Virginia's heritage from the generation of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison gave her immense prestige that was expected to attract the rest of the upper South to the Confederacy. And as events turned out, perhaps the greatest asset that Virginia brought to the cause of southern independence was Robert E. Lee.
Lee was fifty-four years old in 1861, the son of a Revolutionary War hero, scion of the First Families of Virginia, a gentleman in every sense of the word, without discernible fault unless a restraint that rarely allowed emotion to break through the crust of dignity is counted a fault. He had spent his entire career in the U.S. army since graduating second in his West Point class of 1829. Lee's outstanding record in the Mexican War, his experience as an engineer officer, as a cavalry officer, and as superintendent of West Point had earned him promotion to full colonel on March 16, 1861. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott considered Lee the best officer in the army. In April, Scott urged Lincoln to offer Lee field command of the newly levied Union army. As a fellow Virginian Scott hoped that Lee, like himself, would remain loyal to the service to which he had devoted his life. Lee had made clear his dislike of slavery, which he described in 1856 as "a moral and political evil." Until the day Virginia left the Union he had also spoken against secession. "The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation," he wrote in January 1861, "if it was intended to be broken up by every member of the [Union] at will. . . . It is idle to talk of secession."7
But with Virginia's decision, everything changed. "I must side either with or against my section," Lee told a northern friend. His choice was foreordained by birth and blood: "I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children." On the very day he learned of Virginia's secession, April 18, Lee also received the offer of Union command. He told his friend General Scott regretfully that he must not only decline, but must also resign from the army. "Save in defense of my native State," said Lee, "I never desire again to draw my sword." Scott replied sadly: "You have made the greatest mistake of your life, but I feared it would be so." Five days later Lee accepted appointment as commander in chief of Virginia's military forces; three weeks after that he became a brigadier general in the Confederate army. Most officers from the upper South made a similar decision to go with their states, some without hesitation, others with the same bodeful presentiments that Lee expressed on May 5: "I foresee that the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation perhaps for our national sins."8
Scores of southern officers, however, like Scott remained loyal to nation rather than section. Some of them played key roles in the eventual triumph of nation over section: Virginian George H. Thomas, who saved the Union Army of the Cumberland at Chickamauga and destroyed the Confederate Army of Tennessee at Nashville; Tennessean David G.
7. James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 . . . 7 vols. (New York, 1893–1906), III, 299; Nevins, War, I, 109.
8. Nevins, War, I, 107; Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–35), I, 437, 441.
Farragut, who captured New Orleans and damned the torpedoes at Mobile Bay
; North Carolinian John Gibbon, who became one of the best division commanders in the Army of the Potomac while three of his brothers fought for the South. At the same time a few northern-born officers who had married southern women chose to go with their wives' section rather than with their own, and rose to high positions in the Confederacy: New Jersey's Samuel Cooper, who married a Virginian and became adjutant general in the Confederate army; Pennsylvanian John Pemberton, who also married a Virginia woman and rose to command of the Army of Mississippi, which he surrendered to Grant at Vicksburg; and Josiah Gorgas, also of Pennsylvania, who married the daughter of an Alabama governor, became chief of ordnance for the Confederacy, where he created miracles of improvisation and instant industrialization to keep Confederate armies supplied with arms and ammunition.
II
The example of Virginia—and of Robert E. Lee—exerted a powerful influence on the rest of the upper South. Arkansas was the next state to go. Its convention had adjourned in March without taking action, subject to recall in case of emergency. Lincoln's call for troops supplied the emergency; the convention reassembled on May 6. Even before the delegates arrived in Little Rock, however, pro-secession Governor Henry Rector aligned his state with the Confederacy by seizing federal arsenals at Fort Smith and Little Rock and by allowing Confederate forces to place artillery to command the Mississippi at Helena. The convention met in an atmosphere of high emotion, the galleries packed with spectators waving Confederate flags. Within minutes an ordinance of secession came to the floor. A motion to submit this ordinance to a referendum—a test vote of unionist strength at the convention—was defeated 55 to 15. Most of the fifteen minority delegates came from the Ozark Plateau of northwest Arkansas, where few slaves lived. After defeat of this motion, the convention passed the ordinance of secession by a vote of 65 to 5.9
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