A Disease in the Public Mind

by Thomas Fleming

  Then came the soaring words Seward had persuaded Lincoln to use as his closing lines: “We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone 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.”3

  • • •

  In Virginia, well over half the delegates to the state convention in Richmond heard a hope of peace in Lincoln’s words.

  Not even a two-day-long pro-secession oration by ex-President Tyler on March 13 changed their minds. They ignored his call to make Virginia’s “proud crest” [her flag] lead “the great procession of states” who were determined to defend their liberties, “peaceably if they can, forcibly if they must.”4

  That same day Colonel Robert E. Lee attended a reception at the White House for seventy-eight high-ranking military officers. It was the only time he met President Lincoln. There is no record of any conversation between them. But there is a strong likelihood that Lincoln gave him more than a passing glance. Already, General Winfield Scott was telling people that Lee was worth “fifty thousand soldiers” to the Union army, if war came. A few days later, at Scott’s recommendation, Lincoln promoted Lee to full colonel in command of the First Regiment of the U.S. Cavalry, one of the most coveted appointments in the U.S. Army. On March 28, Lee accepted the promotion without the slightest trace of hesitation.5

  Not long after he returned from Texas, Colonel Lee had spent three hours with General Scott in his office. The visit did not go unnoticed among the government’s insiders. Lee probably learned that Scott had advised Lincoln to withdraw the garrison from Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor—one of the two federal forts in the South still in the government’s possession. (The other was Fort Pickens, in Florida.) Scott was trying to outmaneuver the hotheads in South Carolina, who were eager to start a war. The general also told Lee that he was prepared to use force—or at least the threat of force—to end the secession of the cotton states.

  Scott was relying on his memory of President Andrew Jackson’s success in 1833, when he responded to South Carolina’s attempt to secede by summoning a hundred thousand volunteers. Charleston’s boasters and strutters had crumpled without anyone firing a shot. Scott also probably told Lee that he himself was too old to take the field, and that he would appoint someone to act as his second in command. There was little doubt who that someone would be.

  The name of the game, as Scott and the political conciliators saw it, was finding a way to keep Virginia and the other border states in the Union. Without them, the cotton states would be a minority, some of which might start talking peace. Lee’s acceptance of his colonel’s commission from President Lincoln suggested he was ready to cooperate with this solution. It was certainly evidence that he considered Lincoln his legally elected commander in chief.

  Another sign of the colonel’s thinking was his reaction to a message from L. P. Walker, the Confederate secretary of war, offering him a brigadier’s commission in the secessionists’ army. Lee did not even bother to reply. Eight days later, on April 3, the Virginia convention voted down another secession resolution, 90 to 45.6

  • • •

  Elsewhere the omens for peace became embroiled in the contest between the abolitionists and the conciliators swirling around Lincoln. South Carolina was demanding the surrender of Fort Sumter. They had come very close to seizing the fort in the last days of Buchanan’s term. John Tyler had talked them out of it. The demoralized president was so grateful that he had abandoned protocol and called on Tyler and his wife in their hotel room to thank them personally. On March 15, Lincoln had asked his cabinet what they thought he should do about Sumter. Five out of the seven members recommended evacuation. The combination of General Scott and Secretary Seward had been persuasive. Without consulting Lincoln, Seward had even told Confederate commissioners who had come to Washington to negotiate relations between the two governments that the fort would be evacuated. Lincoln had refused to meet with these diplomats. He had made it clear in his inaugural address that he still considered the seceded states part of the Union.

  Only one cabinet member, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, a spokesman for a border state, Maryland, urged an attempt to keep Fort Sumter. Blair argued that surrender of the fort would discourage southern unionists. He even said giving up the fort would be tantamount to giving up the Union. Like General Scott, Blair was remembering Andrew Jackson’s triumph in 1833, from a different angle of vision. His stand ignited the combative side of Lincoln’s character that he had largely concealed in his inaugural address.

  The president was also being bombarded by angry taunts from northern newspapers. “HAVE WE A GOVERNMENT?” one headline screeched. The administration, the New York Times growled, “must have a policy of action.” Its publisher, Henry Raymond, was one of the founders of the Republican Party. Lincoln invited Raymond to visit him in the White House. The president told the newsman that most of his time since his inauguration had been consumed by office seekers. “I am like a man so busy in letting rooms at one end of his house, that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning in the other.” The New York Herald concluded: “The Lincoln administration is cowardly mean and vicious.”

  The president decided to act. Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, had reported that he would run out of food by April 15. Lincoln sent a courier to the governor of South Carolina, informing him that the federal government planned to resupply the Sumter garrison “with provisions only.” There would be no attempt “to throw in men, arms or ammunition” unless the South Carolina government resisted the process.

  The governor telegraphed the message to Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Montgomery. Davis asked his secretary of state, Robert Toombs, to advise him. Toombs replied: “The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen . . . Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder and you will lose us every friend in the North.”7

  Others disagreed. Virginian Roger Pryor told Davis that he would never persuade the Old Dominion to join them if he did not “strike a blow!” Edmund Ruffin, the distributor of John Brown’s pikes, was even more vehement on this point.

  President Davis decided on gunfire and telegraphed Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, the commander in Charleston, permitting him to choose the time. On April 11, Beauregard tried to persuade Major Anderson to surrender peacefully. Anderson, a fellow West Pointer, replied that he was “cordially uniting with you in the desire to avoid the effusion of blood.” He offered to surrender the fort on April 15, when his supplies ran out. That was not the kind of surrender Beauregard—and Davis—wanted. Within minutes, Anderson was told that the Confederate batteries in Charleston would open fire within the hour.

  The man who pulled the lanyard of the first gun was Edmund Ruffin—a veritable admission that it was an extremist act. For the next thirty-three hours, cannon and mortars hurled tons of metal at the old fort at the mouth of the harbor. The fort’s gunners replied often enough to satisfy their honor as soldiers and then surrendered. In Washington, DC, President Lincoln issued a proclamation, summoning 75,000 militia to “suppress combinations” too powerful for the government to confront with ordinary means.8

  Across the North, passion exploded everywhere. Huge rallies proclaimed a readiness for war. Watching 50,000 people surge into Union Square at Broadway and Fourteenth Street in New York City, book publisher William Appleton said, “We shall crush out this rebellion as an elephant would trample on a mouse.”

  In Boston the rallies were even more immense. Governor Andrew welcomed the war. Within three days he had three regiments on the way to Washington, DC. Gerrit Smith said he was ready to finance a regiment of Negro troops and would send his only son, Greene Smith, into battle without pay. Wendel
l Philips, the most ferocious of New England’s antislavery orators, said he was no longer a disunionist. William Lloyd Garrison, burner of the Constitution and another apostle of northern secession, said similar things. For forty years, New England had sulked and defied the federal government in two wars, mocked President Jefferson’s embargo, and conferred in Hartford on terms of disunion. At last they could combine patriotism with their hatred of the South.9

  Less visible—and far more crucial—was the reaction of the border states. The Virginia Convention went into secret session and took a vote. A narrow majority—60 to 53—still resisted secession. But it was more and more obvious that the unionists were losing ground. Kentucky’s governor called the president’s request for troops “wicked.” The governor of Missouri said it was “diabolical.” Both refused to send a man. Tennessee’s governor said similar things, as did the governors of North Carolina and Arkansas. Maryland said nothing but also made no attempt to summon her soldiers. Nor did Delaware. Spokesmen such as John Bell of Tennessee, who had campaigned for the presidency as a unionist, called for a “united South” and accused Lincoln of declaring war.

  • • •

  At Arlington, Colonel Robert E. Lee’s hopes sank as he watched passion replace reason across the South and the North. On April 17, a soldier leaped from a lathered horse with a message from General Scott. He wanted to see Colonel Lee in his office. The envelope also contained a letter from a cousin, John Lee, asking him to talk with Francis P. Blair. Colonel Lee had become friendly with Blair during a tour of duty in St. Louis, Missouri.

  Even without that connection, the Colonel would have recognized Blair’s name, as would anyone who worked for the federal government in the previous three decades. Blair was a mover and shaker of awesome dimensions. Under President Jackson, he had edited the Congressional Globe, the paper that everyone faintly interested in politics read to find out what the White House was thinking. The Globe had been the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party for a decade.

  When Senator Douglas repealed the Missouri Compromise in 1854, Blair became a Republican with undiminished political influence. He chaired the 1856 and 1860 Republican Conventions, where he was instrumental in Lincoln’s nomination. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair was his son—and we can be sure that when he urged Fort Sumter’s resupply, Lincoln considered the advice as coming from his father.

  On April 18, 1861, Colonel Lee rode across the long bridge that linked Virginia to Washington, DC, and tied his horse in front of Montgomery Blair’s house on Pennsylvania Avenue, opposite the building containing the State War and Navy Departments. It was an appropriate setting for one of the most crucial conversations in American history.

  Waiting for him was balding seventy-year-old Francis Preston Blair. There is no record of the exact words, but we know that Blair, after the usual courtesies, grew solemn and told Lee that he had been authorized by President Lincoln to offer him command of the northern army that would assemble when the 75,000 volunteers reached Washington.

  Here was a moment when history’s direction hung on the loyalties and beliefs and emotions of a single man. If Robert E. Lee had accepted this offer, there is at least a possibility that Virginia would have refused to secede. Even if she seceded, Lee’s prestige as a soldier, and his links through his father and his wife to George Washington, would have had an enormous impact on the legitimacy of the South’s resistance. Northern newspapers would have trumpeted the significance of his decision. Divisive doubts would have been implanted in the souls of thousands of wavering southern unionists, especially in Virginia. The duration of the war—its very nature—might have changed.

  As Robert E. Lee sat there trying to absorb this astounding offer, what did he think and feel? What did he remember? Almost certainly his first thought was John Brown. That madman’s rant about the sin of slavery and the blood that was required to wash it away, the pikes he had been prepared to put into the hands of slaves, weapons that might have been thrust into the bodies of Lee’s daughters and wife, the letters in Brown’s carpetbag linking him to wealthy northern backers. Could General Lee invade Virginia or any other southern state at the head of an army composed of men who believed John Brown was as divine as Jesus Christ? How would the orders of a southern-born general, a slave owner thanks to his wife, restrain such men?

  Next perhaps came the memory of the way the abolitionists had smeared him in their newspapers in 1859—accused him of stripping a young black woman and personally lashing her. Did he want to fight for a government that had been elected, in part at least, by these fanatics? What would prevent them from smearing him all over again if he lost a battle or even a skirmish? The thought of their righteous arrogance filled him with loathing.

  Finally might have come that now distant but still terrible memory of the way Nat Turner and his army of maddened black men had slaughtered men, women, and children only a few miles from Fortress Monroe. Would that happen again if his northern army routed the South’s soldiers? Would there be times—even for a few hours—when slaves ran wild that way?

  No, No, No. That was the word that whispered in Robert E. Lee’s soul. He could never undertake such a task. He could not dismiss his anger at the way the abolitionists had reviled southern white men for so long. In sad, careful phrases, Colonel Lee thanked Francis Preston Blair and President Lincoln for this remarkable offer of command. But he could not accept it. He “could not take part in an invasion of the southern states.”

  Blair refused to let him leave. They talked for another hour, with Blair trying to convince Lee of how much he could achieve as the army’s commander. The politician portrayed himself as a sympathetic fellow Southerner. But he could not change Lee’s mind. History, coinciding with so many personal memories, was simply too strong.

  Lee finally escaped by promising to discuss the offer with General Scott. In his office, it did not take more than a glance for Lee to see that Scott was aware of what Blair had offered, and was hoping—even desperately hoping—that Lee had accepted. There was no need for small talk. Lee immediately told him what had been said, and his answer. “Lee,” the general said. “You have made the greatest mistake of your life. But I feared it would be so.”

  Scott also could not let him go. He revealed his secret hope. An overwhelming federal force, with Lee as its leader, would intimidate the South into talking peace, without any need for a bloody offensive. Sadly, painfully, Lee demurred. He was sure that an invasion of Virginia would be necessary—and it was something he could not and would not lead.

  Scott sighed and asked Lee if he intended to resign. For a moment Lee was mute. This was the decision that he had tried not to think about for weeks. It would mean the repudiation of thirty-four years of his life. He had hoped to keep his commission until Virginia voted to secede. But Scott reminded him that an officer could not remain on active duty after he turned down an assignment. “You should resign at once,” Scott said. “Your present attitude is equivocal.”10

  Those words were a sad farewell from someone Lee admired more than any other man in his life, even his father. For a full minute the two men stood there, hands clasped, too moved to say a word. Then Lee turned and strode out of Scott’s office, and out of the U.S. War Department, forever.

  That night back in Arlington, Lee learned that Virginia militia, led by ex-Governor Henry Wise, had seized the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. The Virginia Convention had been in secret session since April 16. Three days later, on April 19, the historic date on which gunfire at Lexington had begun the American Revolution, newspapers reported that the convention had voted for secession.

  For another two days, Lee could not bring himself to resign. One of Arlington’s slaves later recalled watching him walk up and down the mansion’s porch, trying to make up his mind. “He didn’t cahr [care] to go,” the black man said. Lee’s daughter Agnes said that Arlington “felt as if there was a death in it.” They were watching a man whose heart was with the South while his head remained loya
l to the North. There were so many ties forbidding that letter of resignation: Arlington itself, with its memorabilia of Washington and Mary Custis Lee’s link to Mount Vernon; his father’s legacy as the general who smashed the Whiskey Rebellion; his West Point oath committing him to Duty, Honor, Country.

  Finally, Lee wrote a one-line letter of resignation and showed it to his wife. “Mary,” he said. “Your husband is no longer an officer in the U.S. Army.” The letter went to Simon Cameron, the Secretary of War. With it Lee attached a note to General Scott. He begged his mentor and friend to understand his agonized struggle to decide whether “to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted all the best years of my life.”11

  Forty percent of the West Point graduates from Virginia did not agree with Lee. They remained loyal to the Union. So did many members of the Lee family. Lee knew that his oldest son, Custis, disagreed with him. In one of the many letters he wrote to relatives, Lee asked his wife to tell Custis that he was free to make up his own mind. “If I have done wrong, let him do better.” Mary Custis voiced strong unionist sentiments almost to the day Lee resigned. Their son Rooney followed his father’s lead, but he made no secret of his opinion that the southern people had “lost their senses.”12

  Ultimately, there seems to be little doubt that the primary disease of the northern public mind—abolitionism—and the primary disease of the southern public mind—fear of a race war—made Robert E. Lee a reluctant secessionist.