A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  On the same day, Francis Blair, Sr., Montgomery Blair’s father, called upon Lincoln at the White House and told him “the surrender of Fort Sumter … was virtually a surrender of the Union unless under irresistible force—that compounding with treason was treason to the Govt.” The next day the elder Blair wrote to Montgomery, who passed the letter on to Lincoln. The elder Blair half apologized—“I may have said things that were impertinent”—for his strong words with the president. Hearkening back to the resolve of President Jackson in the nullification crisis with South Carolina in 1832, the Blairs, father and sons, were committed to stiffening the backbone of Lincoln.

  Two days later, Montgomery Blair hurried to the White House to introduce Lincoln to his brother-in-law, Gustavus Fox, a short, sturdy former naval officer who was now in private business in Massachusetts. Fox, at the urging of the Blairs, presented an inventive plan to resupply Fort Sumter. He had offered his plan to President Buchanan in February, who had turned him away, but Lincoln heard him out. Having studied the Confederate defenses, Fox proposed sending a large steamer, carrying troops, accompanied by two New York tugboats, carrying supplies. Arriving by daylight, he would test Confederate intentions and probe the vulnerable places in their defenses, and then run in men and supplies by the cover of night.

  Impressed, Lincoln presented the plan at the cabinet meeting of March 15, 1861. Fox told the cabinet he was willing to risk his life in leading the relief effort. After the meeting, Lincoln sent a note to each cabinet member with a single question: “Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort-Sumpter, under all the circumstances, is it wise to attempt it?”

  On Monday, March 18, 1861, with a spring snow hanging on in Washington, Lincoln sat alone at his desk to review the seven responses from his cabinet.

  William Seward, secretary of state, writing in his suite of two rooms on the second floor of the State Department building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street, offered an extended answer that was summed up in one conviction, “I would not provoke war in any way now.” No.

  Salmon Chase, secretary of the treasury, after voicing concern that “the attempt will so inflame civil war,” concluded “it seems to me high improbable that the attempt … will produce such consequences.” A qualified yes.

  Simon Cameron, secretary of war, influenced by the arguments of the army officers, answered, “It would be unwise now to make such an attempt.” No.

  Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy, believed the attempt would need to have both a military and a political component, but on both counts, “I do not think it wise.” No.

  Caleb Smith, secretary of the interior, after weighing the conflicting army and navy recommendations, concluded, “It would not be wise under all circumstances.” No.

  Edward Bates, attorney general, after sifting the legal arguments, concluded, “I do not think it wise now to attempt to provision Fort Sumter.” No.

  Montgomery Blair, postmaster general, alone, voiced his strong support for provisioning Fort Sumter, on two counts. First, he believed this action would inspire a like-minded courage among loyal Unionists in the South. Second, not to do so “will convince the rebels that the administration lacks firmness.” Such an evacuation would signal an unwillingness “to maintain the authority of the United States.” Yes.

  The count was 5 to 2, a clear majority against a relief mission, but Lincoln was not yet prepared to abandon Fort Sumter. He decided to test some of the conjectures of his advisers. To gather yet more information, he sent Fox to see Anderson and investigate the problems and possibilities in a defense of Fort Sumter. He also dispatched Ward Hill Lamon and Stephen Hurlbut, an old Illinois friend who had grown up in Charleston, for a second reconnoiter mission. Seward had argued that Unionism was strong if temporarily silent in South Carolina. Lincoln wanted to test this thesis. Fox returned on March 25, 1861, more ready than ever to attempt the resupply mission. Hurlbut and Lamon returned on March 27 reporting that the American flag could not be seen flying anywhere. “The Sentiment of National Patriotism always feeble in Carolina, has been Extinguished.”

  As the crisis at Fort Sumter focused inordinate attention on Lincoln, everyone sought to take the measure of the new president. William Howard Russell, special correspondent of the Times of London, had earned an international reputation from twenty years of reporting on events in Ireland, India, and the Crimean War. Russell had arrived in New York in the middle of March and hurried on to Washington. On March 27, 1861, the generously proportioned London correspondent was taken to the White House. Russell recorded in his diary his first impressions of Lincoln.

  There entered, with a shambling, loose, irregular, almost unsteady gait, a tall, lank, lean man, considerably over six feet in height, with stooping shoulders, long pendulous arms, terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions, which, however, were far exceeded in proportion by his feet. He was dressed in an ill-fitting, wrinkled suit of black, which put one in mind of an undertaker’s uniform at a funeral; round his neck a rope of black silk was knotted in a large bulb, with flying ends projecting beyond the collar of his coat; his turned-down shirt-collar disclosed a sinewy, muscular yellow neck, and above that, nestling in a great black mass of hair, bristling and compact like a ruff of marching pins, rose the strange quaint face and head, covered with its thatch of wild republican hair, of President Lincoln.

  Russell, known to be disdainful of everything not English, left his first encounter with Lincoln “agreeably impressed with his shrewdness, humor, and natural sagacity.”

  The clock was running down at Fort Sumter. As it did, Americans of all political persuasions were growing impatient with the president.

  Senator John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, Southern Democratic presidential candidate in 1860, was the voice of the remnant of Southerners still in Congress. Breckinridge kept pressing for information on Lincoln’s policies and criticized the North for being unwilling to compromise. On March 28, 1861, Lyman Trumbull introduced a Senate resolution to support, but also to prod, Lincoln. “Resolved, the opinion of the Senate, the true way to preserve the Union is to enforce the laws of the Union.” As Lincoln’s political career ascended, Trumbull’s relationship with Lincoln had begun to cool. Trumbull viewed Lincoln as “ambitious but indecisive, a compromiser who could be swayed by knowledgeable advisors” like Seward. The final words of his resolution read: “It is the duty of the President … to use all means in his power to hold and protect the public property of the United States.” Trumbull, distrusting Seward and unsure of Lincoln, wanted not simply to encourage the president, but to make him accountable to the consensus he hoped the Republicans were building in Congress.

  Also on March 28, 1861, General Scott told Lincoln, once again, that Fort Sumter could not be resupplied. Lincoln, who corresponded with General Scott all through the long secession winter, had come to Washington with great admiration for the old military hero. In one of Lincoln’s first acts of presidential leadership, he made the painful decision to respectfully disagree with those whom he respected. That night, Lincoln slept not at all.

  By March 29, 1861, Good Friday, Lincoln had decided to resupply Fort Sumter, “but he took care to make it as unprovocative as possible.” He informed his cabinet at their noon meeting that, with only two weeks left before supplies would run out, he was ordering Welles and Cameron to draw up plans for the relief of the fort. Gustavus Fox went to New York to take charge of naval preparations to sail for Charleston harbor. Lincoln had made his first real decision as commander in chief.

  The weeks of nonstop debate and indecision had taken a toll. Lincoln told a military officer, “If to be the head of Hell is as hard as what I have to undergo here, I could find it in my heart to pity Satan himself.” Sam Ward, a Washington insider, noted on March 30, “ ‘Abe’ is getting heartily sick of ‘the situation’—It is hard for the Captain of a new Steamer to ‘work this passage.’ ” Ward wrote that the day before, Lincoln had told a mutual friend he was
“in the dumps.”

  WHEN THE LINCOLNS ARRIVED in Washington, a number of churches had invited them to attend Sunday worship. Two days after the inauguration, the First Presbyterian Church invited President and Mrs. Lincoln to accept a pew in their church, free of rent. Many Protestant congregations in the nineteenth century charged pew rents as a means of raising money for church budgets. First Presbyterian, which enjoyed its reputation as “the church of the presidents,” boasted that Presidents Jackson, Van Buren, Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan had worshipped there. It was made up largely of Democrats and had until recently included many of the Southern members of Congress.

  On the first Sunday after inauguration, the Lincolns worshipped at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. The next week a deacon from the church brought a plat, or map, of the pews to the White House for inspection. No free rent.

  New York Avenue was an Old School congregation, whereas First Presbyterian Church was New School. The Presbyterian Church had split in 1837 over a number of theological and organizational issues. Both traditions were grounded in the Bible, but the Old School rooted itself in a rational doctrinal tradition, whereas the New School was more open to experience expressed in the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening. The New School committed itself to political reform, especially antislavery reform, whereas the Old School held that the church should not involve itself in political questions.

  Phineas Densmore Gurley was the minister at New York Avenue. He had graduated first in his class at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1840. A fine-looking man of large frame and voice, Gurley stood squarely in the American Old School Presbyterian understanding of Reformed theology. American Presbyterians strove to balance a high view of God with a low view of humanity. A denomination that prized learned ministers, they nevertheless understood God not as the first principle in philosophy but as the primary actor in history. Lincoln, ever attuned to paradox, appreciated the Presbyterian belief that the sinful-ness of human beings did not lead to passivity, because Christian men and women were called to be instruments of divine purpose in society. Though Lincoln had attended the First Presbyterian Church in Springfield infrequently, he would become more regular in his attendance at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, and Gurley would become a regular visitor in the White House. Lincoln sent his first quarterly check for the pew rent of fifty dollars a year.

  “WANTED—A POLICY.” In an editorial on April 3, 1861, the New York Times charged the new Republican administration with “a blindness and a stolidity without parallel in the history of intelligent statesmanship.” Editor Henry J. Raymond aimed his criticism at Lincoln. “He must go up to a higher level than he has yet reached, before he can see and realize the high duties to which he has been called.”

  As painful as it must have been to hear this charge from a leading newspaper that had supported his election, Lincoln found himself blindsided by the person closest to him in his cabinet. Seward, increasingly perturbed by what he came to believe was Lincoln’s lack of leadership, finally reacted in exasperation. On Sunday, March 31, 1861, he had drafted a letter, “Some Thoughts for the President’s consideration.” Seward’s son, Frederick, delivered the letter to the president on Monday morning, April 1.

  “We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign. … Further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the Administration, but danger upon the country.” What was the solution? Seward stated, “It must be somebody’s business to pursue and direct it incessantly.” And who should the leader be? “Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it; or Devolve it on some member of his Cabinet.” Certainly Seward did not consider himself out of line. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the secretary of state assumed a major share of leadership in presidential administrations.

  Lincoln replied immediately, responding point by point. He acknowledged that he and Seward had disagreed over the question of resupplying Fort Sumter. The president declared he did have a new policy and reiterated the policy outlined in his inaugural address. He reminded Seward, who had been helpful in reviewing the second draft of the address, “This had your distinct approval at the time.” Yet Lincoln probably never sent his carefully worded letter, the first of many letters he wrote as president but never sent, deciding it would be better to speak with Seward in person. Lincoln told Seward, “If this must be done, I must do it.”

  Lincoln took another significant step forward on April 1, 1861. He wrote a short note to General Scott asking, “Would it impose too much labor” to “make short, comprehensive daily reports to me of what occurs in his Department, including movements by himself, and under his orders, and the receipt of intelligence?” Framed politely, as a question, it was in fact an order that indicated Lincoln’s belief that he needed to become more directly involved in the military’s day-by-day operations. That Lincoln read these reports carefully was evident nearly three weeks later when he wrote a memo to himself, “No report from Gen. Scott this 19. April 1861.”

  On a warm Saturday, April 6, 1861, with the trees beginning to leaf out and the peach trees blossoming in the capital, political tensions were mounting. Lincoln directed Secretary of War Cameron to dispatch a courier, Robert S. Chew, to Charleston with a message for Governor Andrew W. Pickens of South Carolina: “An attempt will be made to supply Fort-Sumter with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made.” After a series of aggravating delays, on April 9, Fox sailed from New York, with his small fleet planning to rendezvous off Charleston harbor.

  Governor Pickens quickly notified Jefferson Davis of Lincoln’s message. The leaders of the Confederacy found Lincoln’s action to be a direct threat. The Confederate cabinet met and decided to seek the immediate surrender of Fort Sumter. At noon on April 11, 1861, a message was sent to Major Anderson demanding surrender. He refused.

  In the meantime, the sailing of the relief mission to Fort Sumter had run afoul of yet another squabble between cabinet members, a feud between Seward and Welles. Seward, who believed that Fort Pickens should be reinforced but Sumter evacuated, intervened at the last moment to persuade Lincoln to divert the warship Powhatan to accompany the mission to Fort Pickens instead of to Fort Sumter. Fox was unaware of the change, which would deprive him of his most powerful weapon.

  As Lincoln waited to hear news of Fox’s relief expedition, Jefferson Davis and his military leaders attacked. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard ordered a Confederate battery to open fire on Fort Sumter, thirty-nine days after Lincoln’s inaugural address. A single red ball arced ominously over Fort Sumter and exploded. Quickly, forty-three guns and mortars circling the harbor opened fire. Anderson deliberately held his fire until 7 a.m., when Captain Abner Doubleday fired at a South Carolina shore battery. Fort Sumter had been built to repel a naval, not a land, assault. Anderson’s best guns were mounted on the top tier of the fort, but this meant the men manning them would be most vulnerable to incoming fire.

  The attack on Fort Sumter on April 12–13, 1861, galvanized Northern opinion to defend the Union. The attack is dramatized in this illustration from Harper’s Weekly April 27, 1861.

  A powerful Atlantic storm had delayed Fox’s depleted fleet, and he discovered off Charleston that he had lost his three tugboats. As the bombardment proceeded, the captains of the Pawnee and Harriet Lane believed it too treacherous to navigate their ships around the sandbar at the mouth of the harbor; they could only watch helplessly from afar.

  At noon on April 13, after thirty-three hours, and four thousand shots and shells, Anderson ordered a white flag raised in surrender. Fox’s flotilla finally arrived to ferry Anderson and his small garrison back to the North. Anderson held in his hands a tattered American flag. The Confederates had fired the first shot of the Civil War.

  WASHINGTON BEC
AME ALIVE with the news about the bombardment of Fort Sumter. The mood was a curious mixture of foreboding and expectation: relief that the long stalemate was over, and an adventurous—if reckless—spirit ready to go to war. Horatio Nelson Taft, who came to Washington to work in the Patent Office in 1858, expressed the sentiment of many when he wrote in his diary for April 13, 1861, “Everybody much excited, and all will soon be compelled to ‘show their hands,’ for or against the Union.”

  Abraham and Mary Lincoln worshipped that Sunday morning at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. In his sermon, Phineas Gurley pointed to “God, in his merciful providence” offering “another opportunity for counsel, for pause, for appeal to Him for assistance before letting loose upon the land the direct scourge which He permits to visit a people—civil war.” Gurley concluded with a prayer that the “counsels of the Administration might be sanctified and blessed.”

  In the afternoon, Lincoln was working alone when Stephen Douglas arrived unexpectedly. Lincoln took from his desk a draft of the proclamation he planned to issue the next day. The two men studied Lincoln’s text. Lincoln intended to ask for 75,000 volunteers to join the army. “I would make it 200,000,” declared Douglas. The two men talked together for almost two hours, their meeting marked, in Douglas’s words, by a “cordial feeling of a united, friendly, and patriotic purpose.”

  Douglas later spoke of their meeting. While emphasizing that he was opposed to the administration, and that he had been against the attempt to resupply Fort Sumter, he declared that he was now united with the president in the need for strong action. Douglas reported they “spoke of the present & future, without reference to the past.” When Douglas met a friend at the telegraph office who asked about Lincoln, he replied, “I’ve known Mr. Lincoln a longer time than you have, or than the country has; he’ll come out right, and we will all stand by him.” The account of Douglas’s conversation with Lincoln was printed widely.