A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  As the war broke out, Lincoln had the freedom to act without the restraint of Congress, which wasn’t in session, but he knew he could not act alone. He needed the authorization of Congress in order to prosecute and to pay for the war. But the legislative branch of the government was not scheduled to convene as the new Thirty-seventh Congress until the first Monday in December.

  On April 15, 1861, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for a special session of Congress to convene on July 4, 1861. The coming storm, of which Lincoln had spoken many times, had arrived in the waters off Charleston, South Carolina. Within the next two months, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee would join the Confederacy, bringing the number of states to eleven.

  At the time, and ever since, critics have scrutinized Lincoln’s words and actions in an attempt to understand his intentions during this crisis. Did Lincoln, given contradictory advice by his political and military advisers, arrive at a result beyond his control? Or, by his decision to resupply Fort Sumter, did he control events, forcing the Confederacy to fire the first shot at Fort Sumter? As Lincoln had said in his inaugural address, “The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.” Did he do everything in his power to forestall open hostilities between the North and the South?

  In the next months, Lincoln offered an explanation of his actions to two friends. Of the military officers he met in March and April, he had come to especially admire naval officer Gustavus Fox. He wrote to him on May 1, 1861, “You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort-Sumpter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.” Ten weeks after the event, Lincoln told his old friend Orville Browning, “The plan succeeded. They attacked Sumter—it fell, and thus did more service than it otherwise could.” Lincoln did confess to Browning, “All the troubles and anxieties of his life had not equaled those which intervened between this time and the fall of Fort Sumter.”

  As Lincoln encountered these troubles, he began to find his footing. Respectfully seeking the advice of his senior general, becoming pain fully aware that his secretary of state was charting his own course, listening to the discordant voices of his cabinet, Lincoln proved to be not passive but prudent as he determined his own course on Fort Sumter. The whole constellation of decisions leading to the first shot of the Civil War in South Carolina revealed the initial signs of Lincoln’s emerging presidential leadership.

  President Abraham Lincoln sat for this photograph in Mathew Brady’s studio in Washington in April 1861. Some said at the time that this photograph showed a shrewd if not cunning look—an accusation seized upon by his opponents.

  CHAPTER 18

  A People’s Contest April 1861–July 1861

  THIS ISSUE EMBRACES MORE THAN THE FATE OF THESE UNITED STATES.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Message to Congress in special session, July 4, 1861

  N THE MORNING OF APRIL 15, 1861, THE CITY OF WASHINGTON SHUDDERED with panic. Everywhere citizens looked, they found streets barricaded and buildings blocked by police and soldiers. The navy commandeered boats on the Potomac and set up pickets along the river. Many businesses were closed.

  In the White House, Lincoln paced his second-floor office above the East Room, visibly concerned about the security and safety of the city. His secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, found Lincoln in a state of “nervous tension.” The president reached for his telescope, climbed out on the roof of the Executive Mansion, and scanned the Potomac, looking for any boats conveying Union troops. He then turned his lens toward Alexandria, where, in the midst of church steeples and chimneys, he could see Confederate flags flying in the breeze.

  In the days after the fall of Fort Sumter, residents of the capital struggled to comprehend the unfolding political turmoil. On April 17, 1861, came a report from Richmond that Virginia would schedule a vote in May. The next day, a small company of Union soldiers set fire to Harpers Ferry, where the states of Maryland and Virginia met, before the Union installation could be overrun by a larger Confederate force. On April 19, Baltimore erupted in riot as Southern sympathizers tried to stop New England troops from passing through their city on their way to Washington. By April 20, federal authorities at the immense Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, were burning buildings and scuttling eleven ships in anticipation of a takeover by Confederate troops. And on Sunday evening, April 21, rioters seized the telegraph office in Baltimore, cutting off all communications from Washington to the North. The next day, Horatio Nelson Taft wrote in his diary, “We are in a beleaguered City with enimies on every side and at our doors.”

  Lincoln wondered aloud: Who would defend Washington? The national army, commanded by seventy-four-year-old General Winfield Scott, comprised only sixteen thousand men, the majority spread across seventy-nine outposts on the Western frontier. Almost one-third of its officers were leaving their commissions to join the Confederacy. To make up for the shortage of troops in or near Washington, Scott was forced to organize a few new regiments of old regulars, who called themselves the Silver Grays. Cassius M. Clay, wearing three pistols, organized a group of Kentuckians, while Senator-elect Jim Lane, a veteran of the Kansas border wars, organized his Frontier Guards, who set up headquarters in the East Room of the White House to the delight of Tad and Willie Lincoln. More vigilantes than military men, Clay’s battalion was stationed at the Willard Hotel while Lane’s Frontier Guards stood guard around the Executive Mansion.

  SCOTT WAS TOO OLD and obese to command the Union forces, but Lincoln did seek his counsel for recommendations for the post. Without hesitation, Scott suggested Virginian Colonel Robert E. Lee.

  Lee, the son of Revolutionary War hero “Light Horse” Harry Lee, graduated from West Point in 1829, earning the distinction as the first cadet to graduate from the academy without a single demerit. In 1831, Lee married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, at her parents’ home, Arlington House, just across the Long Bridge from Washington. Posted to the Corps of Engineers, Lee served on General Scott’s staff in the Mexican War, where he distinguished himself for his leadership of troops. After the war, Lee became superintendent of the military academy at West Point. He achieved further recognition for leading the force of marines that captured Harpers Ferry in the raid against John Brown in 1859.

  Lincoln asked Francis Blair, Sr., a fellow Southerner, to approach Lee about commanding the Union forces. Lee, who had been undergoing a deep internal struggle about where his loyalty lay, told Blair that he deprecated secession, but he could not take up arms against his native state of Virginia. After speaking with Blair, Lee went to see Scott, a Virginian who had been a father figure to him, to deliver the same message. Lincoln was disappointed to learn that Lee quickly accepted an invitation from Governor John Letcher of Virginia one week later, April 25, 1861, to become a major general in command of all of Virginia’s forces.

  WAR FEVER SPREAD quickly across the North. Lincoln issued a proclamation calling up seventy-five thousand troops from state militias to serve as three-month volunteers to suppress what he called an insurrection “by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” For his authority, Lincoln relied upon a provision of a 1795 militia law.

  In the North and Northwest, the response to Lincoln’s proclamation was overwhelming. Maine governor Israel Washburn, Jr., wired his guarantee: “The people of Maine of all parties will rally with alacrity to the maintenance of the government.” Ohio’s governor William Denni-son assured Lincoln that he “will furnish the largest number you will receive.” Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana promised ten thousand men “for the defense of the nation and to uphold the authority of the Government.”

  Lincoln’s request for troops from the border states elicited replies that ranged from evasive to defiant. William Burton, g
overnor of Delaware, delayed his answer but finally replied that his state had no militia law. Governor Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky replied brusquely, “Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States.” Claiborne Fox Jackson, the new governor of Mssouri, replied, “Your requisition, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object. … Not one man will the state of Missouri furnish to carry on any such unholy crusade.”

  Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew, one of a coterie of radical Northern leaders, had begun assembling regiments in January, long before Lincoln even took office. As Lincoln’s call to arms raced across the telegraph in April, the Massachusetts troops, with new rifles, were marching in a sleet storm on the Boston Common. Andrew responded, “Dispatch received. By what route should I send?”

  Governor Andrew asked a troubling question. As the troops from the North proceeded toward Washington, they came upon the same problem that Lincoln had encountered nearly two months earlier: how to pass through the narrow neck of Maryland, which commanded the only railroad links to Washington. Maryland, a border state, was filled with Southern sympathizers. Baltimore, located at the top of the Chesapeake Bay, was the center for three major railroads to the West and the North.

  The Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was the first military unit to approach Washington. The seven hundred men arrived in Baltimore on the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad at the President Street Station at noon on April 19, 1861. Immediately, horse-drawn cars began to transport the troops through the city so that their cars could be hooked up to a Baltimore and Ohio engine at Camden Station, one mile away, for the trip to Washington. Word spread quickly that troops from the abolitionist stronghold of Massachusetts had arrived in Baltimore. The soldiers had not gone far along Pratt Street before an angry crowd jeered and then began throwing bricks and stones at them. Panicking, some soldiers fired into the crowd. Twelve civilians and four soldiers died in the riot; scores were injured. The unrest in Baltimore inflamed secessionist passions in the South even as the editors of several Northern newspapers called for Baltimore to be burned to the ground. The riot helped galvanize both Union and Confederate commitments. With no casualties at Fort Sumter, the Baltimore riot of April 19 drew the first blood of the Civil War.

  Through these fearful days, authorities in Maryland pressured the president. Unionist governor Thomas Hicks and Baltimore mayor George W. Brown wired Lincoln, “Send no more troops here.” In Lincoln’s reply on April 20, 1861, he thanked the governor and the mayor for their attempts to preserve the peace, but declared, “Now, and ever, I shall do all in my power for peace, consistently with the maintenance of government.” That evening, John Hay wrote in his diary, “The streets were full of the talk of Baltimore. … The town is full tonight of feverish rumours about a meditated assault upon this town.”

  On April 22, 1861, a Baltimore committee of fifty called on Lincoln at the White House to acknowledge the independence of the Southern states and to ask that no more troops be sent through Baltimore. Lincoln’s patience had run out. He reminded the Baltimore delegation, “Your citizens attack troops sent to the defense of the Government, and yet you would have me break my oath and surrender the Government without a blow.” In Lincoln’s answer he sought to remind his audience of presidential precedent: “There is no Washington in that—no Jackson in that—no manhood or honor in that.” He asked the representatives how the troops were supposed to get to Washington. “Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air.” This abrasive challenge by Maryland authorities stiffened Lincoln’s resolve to defend the capital and the Union.

  Lincoln was looking out of the upstairs windows of the Executive Mansion on April 24, 1861, when the troops of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteers finally reached Pennsylvania Avenue. Clara Barton, a thirty-nine-year-old U.S. Patent Office clerk from Massachusetts, organized a relief program for the soldiers of her home state, beginning on that day a lifetime of nursing and philanthropy. Seeing the troops, Lincoln felt a momentary sense of relief, but he worried that secessionists from Maryland might use the same Baltimore and Ohio tracks to assault the capital. Lincoln hosted some of the wounded officers and men at the Executive Mansion. He commended their courage and wondered aloud about what had happened to the regiments from other states, none of which had arrived in Washington. “I began to believe that there is no North. The Seventh regiment is a myth. Rhode Island is another. You are the only real thing.”

  But two days later, the Seventh Regiment of the New York State Mlitia arrived in Washington after bypassing Baltimore, sailing down the Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis, Maryland, and traveling by train the thirty miles to the capital. In the spring sunshine, Lincoln waited outside the White House as the soldiers, with their splendid regimental brass band, marched up the entire length of Pennsylvania Avenue. Their arrival “created much enthusiasm and relief.” The gloom of the ten days following Fort Sumter disappeared as windows were opened and people took to the streets to meet the young Union soldiers. Lincoln waved his welcome to the troops.

  “WANTED—A LEADER!”

  Even as Lincoln enjoyed reviewing the Seventh New York Regiment, the criticism of his leadership grew louder. He had long since learned to discount condemnation from opposition Democratic newspapers, but it became more difficult to ignore criticism from his friends. On April 25, 1861, he read an editorial in the New York Times, opining, “In every great crisis, the human heart demands a leader that incarnates its ideas, its emotions and its aims. Till such a leader appears, everything is disorder, disaster, and defeat. The moment he takes the helm, order, promptitude and confidence follow as the necessary result. When we see such results—we know that a hero leads.” Something about this particular article compelled Lincoln to clip and save it, including its final charge: “No such hero at present directs affairs.”

  Lincoln faced another challenged when Southern sympathizers in Maryland started cutting telegraph wires, burning bridges, and doing everything in their power to disrupt communications between the North and the capital. Maryland, a state noted for its crabs, was situated geographically like one, with claws pinching in on the capital from three sides.

  On April 27, 1861, Lincoln gave an order to his top commander, General Scott, authorizing him “to suspend the writ of habeas corpus” if “an insurrection against the laws of the United States” erupted anywhere along a line from Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington. The president instructed Scott to make arrests without specific charges. The right of habeas corpus, which protects citizens from illegal detention, requires that a prisoner be brought before a court to decide the legality of his arrest.

  The responses to the suspension of habeas corpus created another predicament for Lincoln. Since the termination of the Revolutionary War seventy-eight years before, Americans had sailed upon a remarkably peaceful sea, with brief interruptions for the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Unlike Europeans and Latin Americans, Americans had become accustomed to living in an open society. The nation was a society of small towns, where most citizens never saw a national army, never encountered a national police force, and encountered little federal intrusion. Authority was vested in the town mayors or constables. Now, in 1861, the arrest of citizens by a national army created a sensation. It caused people to consider, many for the first time, the vessel—the Constitution—in which they were sailing. Fortunately, the person at the helm was an astute lawyer and adroit politician.

  A test case of habeas corpus came one month later when John Mer-ryman was arrested on May 25, 1861, at his home in Cockeysville, Maryland, for allegedly drilling troops to aid the secessionist movement. Merryman was imprisoned at Fort McHenry, the star-shaped brick fort best known for its defense of Baltimore harbor in the War of 1812. Merryman’s lawyer petitioned the federal court in Baltimore to look at the charges against him under the writ of habeas corpus.

  The f
ederal judge who heard the case just happened to be Chief Justice Roger Taney, who had offered the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case in 1857. Merryman obtained a writ from Taney ordering that he be either tried before a regular court or released. When Taney sent his order to Fort McHenry to be served, the officer in charge refused to receive it, citing Lincoln’s order.

  The Constitution, article 1, section 9, specifies that the right of habeas corpus “shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” The Constitution does not say who is authorized to suspend the privilege, but most legal experts, up until 1861, believed the power belonged to Congress, because the suspension clause was found in article 1, which enumerated congressional power. The framers of the Constitution, working against the background of resistance to the powers of a king, George III, placed the habeas corpus clause under congressional power because they were wary of an American president someday assuming monarchical powers.

  Habeas corpus became the only principle of English common law that found its way into the Constitution. In the years leading up to the Civil War, habeas corpus, and corollaries to it, was not studied in law schools nor was it a part of the curriculum at West Point. When habeas corpus was discussed, the debate arose over the contentious fugitive slave law. The writ of habeas corpus came to symbolize America’s commitment to individual freedom. While Lincoln believed that secession went against the Constitution, many argued that arbitrary arrest did as well. Lincoln understood that he had defied the mainstream of judicial opinion in his actions.