But Lincoln knew he could not discuss the Constitution for too long. He needed to speak about what was on the listeners’ minds: the very real possibilities of “bloodshed and violence.” He wanted to establish a baseline: Any violence would not come from his administration. He employed the phrase “national authority,” contrasting his constitutional legitimacy with all lesser authorities.
As Lincoln pivoted from conciliation to firmness, he began by characterizing the actions of the leaders of the secession movement. “Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” Attempting to call to mind memories of 1776, secessionists had clothed themselves in a righteous second war of independence, but Lincoln forcefully disrobed their actions by calling them “anarchy” and “despotism.” Sounding like a teacher of constitutional law, Lincoln made the case that “no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union.” He declared that, “in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken” and he understood it to be his duty as president to ensure “that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States.” Then, as if remembering his conciliatory side, he quickly added, “I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend, and maintain itself.”
No one was more caught up in Lincoln’s address than Stephen Doug las. As Lincoln spoke, Douglas whispered under his breath, “Good,” “That’s so,” “No coercion,” and “Good again.” Lincoln concluded with two dramatic paragraphs. First, he skillfully combined challenge and affirmation, driving home his point by employing one of his favorite rhetorical devices, opposition:
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressor. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect and defend” it.
Lincoln, after being widely criticized for months for failing to understand the threat to the Union, now named the crisis. He wanted the historical testimony to be unambiguous about who the antagonist would be. “The government will not assail you.” Conciliation, the main motif of the speech, yielded in this penultimate paragraph to determination.
After speaking for nearly thirty minutes, Lincoln turned to his concluding paragraph. In his first and second drafts of the address, he had ended with a question: “With you and not with me is the solemn question, ‘Shall it be peace or a sword?’ ” Seward urged Lincoln to employ a different conclusion: “some words of affection—some of calm and cheerful confidence.” Seward achieved the reputation of being a fine speaker, but a comparison affords an opportunity to observe how Lincoln transformed Seward’s words into his own prose poetry.
Seward Lincoln
1. I close. I am loath to close.
2. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow-countrymen and brethren. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
3. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
4. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Lincoln pared away all superfluous words. He made use of assonance, which placed together words or syllables with related sounds. He em ployed alliteration, which brought close together the same consonant and sound five times in the final two sentences, and encouraged the connection of words within the paragraph for the hearer: break, bonds, battlefield, broad, better.
He used symbolic images to shape a rhetoric of unity. The power of his appeal grew as he called to mind the figure of “the mystic chords of memory.” Lincoln, who understood better than anyone the power of words, but who had been silent for the previous ten months, now spoke with the hope that he could bridge the growing divide to appeal to mutual feelings for the Union.
At the conclusion of the address, Chief Justice Taney stepped forward. A bowed, lean figure in his black gown, Taney may have remembered the previous presidents he had sworn in—Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan—as he prepared to swear in a ninth president. Lincoln placed his left hand on the Bible, raised his right hand, and repeated the oath of office. As Lincoln ended the oath, the cheering began. One of the first to congratulate Lincoln was Senator Douglas. Artillery boomed salute after salute to the newly inaugurated sixteenth president.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER LINCOLN’S INAUGURATION, citizens in small hamlets and large cities congregated at newspaper offices eager for telegraphic reports of his address. The next day, the first newspaper responses reflected the nation’s divided opinion. In a highly politicized press, critics read Lincoln’s words through their own partisan glasses.
Greeley’s New York Tribune liked the firmness of Lincoln’s remarks. “The avowal of purpose … is unequivocal, unhesitating, firm, and earnest.” The New York Times, then a barometer of conservative opinion, editorialized that “conservative people are in raptures over the Inauguration.” The two newspapers in Illinois that had long supported Lincoln applauded. The Chicago Tribune stated, “No document can be found among American state papers embodying sounder wisdom and higher patriotism.” The Illinois State Journal in Springfield proclaimed, “The Inaugural Address of our noble Chief Magistrate has electrified the whole country.”
The anti-Lincoln papers heard much to criticize. The Chicago Times deplored the address as “a loose, disjointed, rambling affair.” The New York Herald criticized Lincoln’s words as “neither candid nor statesmanlike; nor does it possess any essential dignity or patriotism.” Comparing Lincoln to his praiseworthy predecessors, the Herald declared the address “would have caused a Washington to mourn, and would have inspired a Jefferson, Madison, or Jackson with contempt.”
Southern newspapers did not hear the conciliation that Lincoln believed was one of the twin pillars of his address. The Richmond Enquirer excoriated the address as “the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic,” believing Lincoln’s aim to be “the dismemberment of the Government with the horrors of civil war.” The Charleston Mercury, an important Southern voice whose editorials were often republished in Northern newspapers, berated Lincoln’s “lamentable display of feeble inability to grasp the circumstances of the momentous emergency.”
In response, the New York Times questioned whether newspapers in the South had even taken time to read the address. “Before the Inaugural has been read in a single Southern State, it is denounced, through the telegraph, from every Southern point, as a declaration of war.”
George Templeton Strong conveyed in his diary the sense of anticipation the inaugural caused in New York City. He reported that on Wall Street, “news from Washington” was “awaited impatiently.” Newspapers printed special editions at noon and 1:30 p.m. Strong read the first half of Lincoln’s inaugural in the second edition of the evening papers. The next day, he had time to read the entire inaugural address and speak with colleagues who liked Lincoln’s conciliatory and cautious approach. Strong, whose diary is fascinating in the ways that he brings in opinions other than his own, offered his response: “I think there is a clank of metal in it.” Strong believed that Lincoln’s address “is unlike any message or state paper of any class that has appeared in my time.” What Strong especially liked was that the inaugural “seems to introduce one to a man and to dispose one to like him.”
Two American
leaders with whom Lincoln was destined to cross paths in dramatic encounters during his presidency were each dispirited in reading the address. Edward Everett followed the reactions to Lincoln’s oratory from his home on Summer Street in Boston. On March 4, 1861, after receiving the inaugural address by telegraph, he lauded Lincoln’s “conciliatory” tone in his journal, but expressed the opinion that Lincoln’s intention to hold the forts would “result in Civil War.” On April 3, he noted that all of the opinions of the English press had now arrived, and wrote that Lincoln’s inaugural address “is almost universally spoken of as feeble, equivocal, and temporizing. It has evidently disappointed public expectation.” He went on to express his empathy for the new president. He believed that Lincoln was caught between the abolitionist beliefs of the Republicans he knew well in New England and the president’s own instincts for magnanimity. “The truth is the President’s situation is impossible.”
Frederick Douglass, from his home at the northwest corner of Robinson Drive and South Avenue in Rochester, New York, was not so charitable. Wrought up with “tension and frustration” during the months of the secession crisis, he characterized the address as “little better than our fears.” It was a “double-tongued document, capable of two constructions, and conceals rather than declares a definite policy.” Douglass contended what cartoonists were illustrating: “No man reading it could say whether Mr. Lincoln was for peace or war.” Douglass had followed Lincoln’s attacks on Stephen Douglas’s race-baiting in their 1858 debates and now found the “denial of all feeling against slavery … wholly discreditable to the head and heart of Mr. Lincoln.” Worst of all, in Douglass’s eyes, was Lincoln’s announced intention to abide by the fugitive slave law. As for what black Americans could expect from the new president, Douglass wrote, “Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell; but the result shows that we merely have a continuation of the Pierces and Buchanans, and that the Republican President bends the knee to slavery as readily as any of his infamous predecessors.”
EARLY ON TUESDAY MORNING, March 5, 1861, Lincoln went to his new White House office where the very first paper given to him was a military communication requiring urgent attention: a letter from Major Robert Anderson, commander of the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, the five-sided fort constructed on a shoal in South Carolina’s Charleston harbor. Anderson wrote that he had supplies to last only six weeks. Unless resupplied, he would be forced to surrender. Lincoln was fully aware of the pressure put upon President Buchanan to surrender Fort Sumter after South Carolina seceded in December, but never had a newly inaugurated president faced such an immediate challenge. In his inaugural address, Lincoln had attempted to balance conciliation and firmness. How would he execute this balance in responding to the threat to Fort Sumter?
At noon, Lincoln sent to the Senate, meeting in extra session, the list of his cabinet.
Secretary of State, William H. Seward, New York
Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, Ohio
Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, Pennsylvania
Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, Connecticut
Secretary of the Interior, Caleb B. Smith, Indiana
Attorney General, Edward Bates, Missouri
Postmaster General, Montgomery Blair, Maryland
The Senate confirmed each cabinet nominee, and the next day each was inducted into office.
Absent from the floor of the Senate when the votes on cabinet positions were taken, Chase was taken aback when colleagues rushed up to congratulate him after he returned. A man of tremendous pride who believed in the right political protocol, Chase sought Lincoln out to decline the nomination. The president explained that it would be embarrassing to both of them if he did not accept the appointment. Chase resigned his seat in the Senate and wrote to Lincoln later that day, “I accept the post which you have tendered me.”
Lincoln’s first executive act, the selection of his cabinet, sent a strong signal both of his own sense of security and the direction of his leadership. Rather than choosing lesser yes-men, he surrounded himself with some of the nation’s most able men: three ex-Whigs, Seward, Bates, and Smith, and four ex-Democrats, Chase, Cameron, Welles, and Blair. Some Republicans immediately criticized Lincoln for the majority of ex-Democrats in his cabinet, but he countered that he, as a former Whig, made the cabinet perfectly balanced: four to four. Lincoln had learned in Illinois how to bring divergent voices together, and he now set out to do this on the larger stage of Washington.
Lincoln convened his first cabinet meeting on the evening of March 6, 1861. The cabinet gathered, in the order of their seniority, around the table in the center of Lincoln’s office. An engraved oil portrait of Andrew Jackson stared down at this gathering of old Whigs, old Democrats, and the new Republican president. Lincoln intended this initial meeting to be only introductory. Attorney General Edward Bates confided to his diary that he found the first cabinet meeting “uninteresting.”
LINCOLN CAME TO THE PRESIDENCY lacking executive experience, and his first weeks in office did little to inspire confidence that he could launch and run a new administration.
A large walnut table, piled with books and maps, dominated his sizable office on the second floor of the White House. Here Lincoln conducted cabinet meetings on Tuesdays and Fridays, but cabinet officers soon learned not to depend on their regularity. Lincoln often worked at an old upright mahogany writing desk by the middle windows of the south wall facing the Washington Monument and further to the Potomac River. His secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, described his desk as looking like it came from “some old furniture auction.” Lincoln used the pigeonholes of the desk, as earlier in Illinois he had used his stovepipe hat and desk drawers, as repositories for his legendary notes to himself. Two horsehair sofas and wooden chairs were scattered about the room in no particular arrangement. More maps hung above the sofas. Oilcloth covered the floor. Lighted by gaslights and heated by a fireplace, the room functioned as a working office, not a ceremonial office, even though Lincoln received many of his guests there. The president could call for Nicolay and Hay with a bell cord close to his desk.
Lincoln was well aware that, in the words of David Davis, “he had no administrative ability until he went to Washington.” At first he tried to do everything by himself. He acknowledged to Robert L. Wilson, a member of the “Long Nine” of the Illinois House of Representatives in the 1830s, his initial floundering. “When [I] first commenced doing the duties, [I] was entirely ignorant not only of the duties, but of the manner of doing the business” of the presidency.
Hay remembered, “There was little order or system about it. … Those around him strove from beginning to end to erect barriers to defend him against constant interruption, but the President himself was always the first to break them down.” Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who as chairman of the Military Affairs Committee would work closely with Lincoln, once tried to counsel him about his availability to people: “You will wear yourself out.” Lincoln replied, “They don’t want much; they get but little, and I must see them.”
It has been suggested that Lincoln, innately cautious, was a reactor rather than an initiator. Certainly, in his first months in office, Lincoln felt his way, and the press of events called for a steep learning curve. But there is a difference between being cautious and being passive. While Lincoln never offered any philosophy of leadership, it is possible to observe principles that guided his development of policy, his relationships with colleagues, and his command of the war. Once in Washington, to the surprise of many, Lincoln was a quick learner.
LINCOLN WAS NOT PREPARED to deal with the crisis of Fort Sumter at the beginning of his presidency. He had determined in Springfield to preserve the Union without war, and he was aware of his inexperience in military matters. His previous method of dealing with crises, such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act or the Dred Scott decision, was to take months to research, think, and brood in private, before annou
ncing his public response. But Anderson’s memorandum informed the War Department that there were only weeks to decide what to do.
Now Lincoln faced a far-reaching choice. He had to deal with the thorny problem of Fort Sumter on Charleston harbor in South Carolina, as well as Fort Pickens, constructed to fortify Pensacola, in the northern part of seceded Florida. The main show was Fort Sumter. Lincoln could surrender Fort Sumter and hope that this might keep the four states of the upper South and four border states from joining the secession, or he could attempt to resupply the forts and take the probable risk of starting a civil war. He asked Buchanan’s secretary of war Joseph Holt, a Unionist Kentuckian who had agreed to stay on while Lincoln waited for Simon Cameron to assume his duties, whether the Kentuckian Robert Anderson could be trusted. Holt said he could. Lincoln would find himself asking this question many times about government officials and military officers in the opening weeks of his administration. The new president needed time to think and to plan, but the clock was ticking.
In the following days, Lincoln conferred with cabinet secretaries and army and navy men about how to tackle the problem in the Charleston harbor. He listened respectfully as Secretary of State Seward argued strongly against resupplying Fort Sumter in order to preserve the peace. Welles, after several of these conferences, wrote of the president in his diary, “He was disinclined to hasty action, and wished time for the Administration to get in working order.”
On Saturday evening, March 9, 1861, when Lincoln reconvened his new cabinet, he invited General Winfield Scott, the hero of the Mexican War, to join the discussion. Scott, old and obese, had been studying Anderson’s dispatches. He urged, in the strongest terms, an evacuation of Fort Sumter. Everyone at the cabinet meeting, with the exception of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, agreed.
Despite the majority sentiment to withdraw, Lincoln decided to seek more information. Later, he wrote out three questions for General Scott. Lincoln convened another cabinet meeting on March 11, 1861, to share Scott’s answers. Scott advised that to undertake a mission to resupply Fort Sumter would take a fleet of war vessels, five thousand regular troops, plus twenty thousand volunteers. Lincoln read the sobering final sentence of Scott’s reply. “To raise, organize, & discipline such an army, would require new acts of Congress & from six to eight months.”
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