by Bruce Catton
Dazzled by the overwhelming public response to the news that one flag had gone down and another had gone up, ordinarily sensible men gave way to uncritical vaporing. Youthful John Hay, the somewhat condescending ornament of the White House secretariat, looked at a company of untried Northern militia and wrote: "When men like these leave their horses, their women and their wine, harden their hands, eat crackers for dinner, wear a shirt for a week and never black their shoes—all for a principle—it is hard to set any bounds to the possibilities of such an army." Hard indeed; particularly so since exactly the same sort of men were doing exactly the same things in the South for a diametrically opposed principle, creating boundless possibilities of their own. Leroy Pope Walker, the Confederate Secretary of War, told a serenading crowd in Montgomery that the Confederate flag "will, before the first of May, float over the dome of the old capital in Washington," and he went on to say that if Southern chivalry were pushed too far, the flag might eventually rise over Faneuil Hall in Boston. The eminent German-American Carl Schurz wrote admiringly that "millionaires' sons rushed to the colors by the side of laborers," and correspondent Russell noted that barefooted poor whites in the deepest South were whooping it up for Confederate independence as loyally as the wealthiest planters.3
Through the fall and winter, events had seemed to move slowly, as if fate wanted to give men a chance to have second thoughts about what was being done. Now everything began to go with a rush, and what was done would be done for keeps. White House routine had gone about as usual on April 13, when Anderson was driven to surrender. Lincoln received visitors, signed papers, worried about patronage. The cabinet met briefly, but in the absence of conclusive news it could do very little. During the morning Lincoln met with a delegation from the Virginia secession convention. What this convention would inevitably do was strongly indicated by the news in the morning papers; Roger Pryor had cried "Strike a blow!" and the blow had been struck, once and for all. Still, there was time for a word from the President, and Lincoln had written out a brief statement: a cautious indication of future policy, saying much less than was on the President's mind.
If it proved true, he said, that Fort Sumter had actually been attacked, he would perhaps suspend the delivery of United States mails in the states that claimed to have seceded, for he believed that the commencement of actual war against the government justified and perhaps required such a step. He still considered all military posts and property in the seces-
sionist states to be Federal property, and he continued to stand by the policy laid down in the inaugural—to hold, occupy and possess such places. He would not try to collect duties and imposts by armed invasion of any part of the country, but at the same time he might conceivably land an armed force, in case of need, to relieve a fort along the borders. . . . The delegates went away as wise as when they came but probably no wiser.4
Lincoln would do a great deal more than he had told the Virginians that Saturday, because he clearly had concluded that the time for temporizing had gone. Whatever might or might not have been done, once the firing began at Fort Sumter, Lincoln was ready to make war. If the border states could stand the shock and would go along, well and good; if not, they could go where they chose. He would fight the theory and the fact of secession with all the power at his disposal, letting what had happened at Charleston stand as a declaration of war. On Sunday, April 14, when news that Anderson had hauled down his flag reached Washington, Lincoln met with his cabinet again, and talked to his military advisers, and on Monday morning he issued a proclamation —an announcement that the war was on, and a statement (as far as one could be made at this moment) of the policy that would guide him in the conduct of that war. It went to the country on April 15. After reciting the obvious fact that "combinations too powerful to be suppressed" by ordinary law courts and marshals had taken charge of affairs in the seven secessionist states, it announced that the several states of the Union were called on to contribute 75,000 militia "in order to suppress said combinations and to cause the laws to be duly executed." It continued:
"I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government; and to redress wrongs already long endured.
"I deem it proper to say that the first service assigned to the forces hereby called forth will probably be to repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union; and in every event, the utmost care will be observed, consistently with the object aforesaid, to avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.
"And I hereby command the persons composing the combinations aforesaid to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within twenty days from this date.
"Deeming that the present condition of public affairs presents an extraordinary occasion, I do hereby, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution, convene both Houses of Congress. Senators and Representatives are therefore summoned to assemble at their respective chambers, at 12 o'clock noon, on Thursday, the fourth day of July, next, then and there to consider and determine such measures, as, in their wisdom, the public safety, and interest may seem to demand."5
This was clear enough, and it went substantially beyond the threat to suspend the mail service and reinforce beleaguered garrisons which he had mentioned to the Virginia delegation two days earlier. It was a flat announcement that the unbroken Union would be fought for, a promise that slavery would not be disturbed—the word "property" had a very specific meaning in those days—and a clear indication that this President would aggressively use all of his powers right up to the hilt. It was mid-April now, and Congress would not meet until early in July. Until then, Abraham Lincoln would be the government, free to act as he chose with no restraint except the knowledge that he would have to give Congress an accounting ten or eleven weeks later—by which time everything Congress did would be done under the incalculable pressure of wartime emergency.
As an experienced politician, Lincoln had looked to his fences before he acted. The Republicans were bound to support him; he was also assured that his decision to go to war would be publicly endorsed by Stephen A. Douglas, which meant that the Democratic party in the Northern states would support the war.
On Sunday evening Congressman George Ashmun, a Massachusetts Republican, called on Douglas at the Senator's home in Washington and urged him to go at once to the White House and tell the President he would do all he could to help him "put down the rebellion which had thus fiercely flamed out in Charleston harbor." Douglas demurred; Lincoln had been firing good Democratic office-holders, many of them friends of Douglas, in order to make jobs for Republicans, and, anyway, Douglas was not sure that Lincoln wanted any advice from him. Ashmun insisted and at last won Douglas over, with the help of Mrs. Douglas, and the two men went to the White House. Lincoln received them cordially, and read to Douglas the proclamation he would issue in the morning. Douglas endorsed it wholeheartedly, but told Lincoln to call out 200,000 men instead of 75,000. Reflecting on the bruises he had received in the Charleston convention at the hands of the cotton-state leaders, Douglas warned: "You do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as well as I do." The President and the man who had opposed him then went to a map, and Douglas pointed to strategic spots that ought to be strengthened—Washington, Harper's Ferry, Fort Monroe, and the muddy Illinois town of Cairo, at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. They parted at last, and Douglas wrote out and gave to the Associated Press a brief statement, telling the country that although he remained a political opponent of the President, "he was prepared to sustain the President in the exercise of all his Constitutional functions to preserve the Union and maintain the Government and defend the Federal capital."6 For a few months, at least, the Democratic party in the North would support the war, and in this third week of April it seemed
that all of the North was an enthusiastic and patriotic unit. The heather was truly on fire. There were "war meetings" everywhere, mayors made speeches, citizens paraded, and military recruiting stations were swamped. State governors who had worried for fear they could not meet the enlistment quotas set by the War Department found they had many times as many applicants as the quotas would accommodate, and began to wonder how they could pacify all of the indignant voters who wanted to go to war and could not be accepted. City after city named committees of public safety, the committee members usually having the loftiest of motives and the haziest of ideas as to their duties. A Southern woman temporarily resident in New England wrote to friends that the intense fervor that was sweeping Massachusetts was not patriotism but simple hatred for the South, but she felt that these Yankees were in earnest whatever their motive, and she voiced a warning: "I would not advise you of the South to trust too much in the idea that the Northerners will not fight, for I believe they will, and their numbers are overwhelming."7 Sober businessmen of Cincinnati met and agreed that they would ship no more goods south— an agreement that languished and died in due course, for Cincinnati was to be an active supply depot for Confederate smugglers of contraband throughout the war.
But if the proclamation moved the North to a wild, almost discordant harmony, it knocked Virginia straight out of the Union and turned the war into a life-or-death affair for the whole nation.
Lincoln had said that to trade a fort for a state, Sumter for Virginia, might be an excellent bargain, although his efforts to drive such a bargain had been tardy and ineffective. Now both fort and state were gone, and their joint departure meant that the war would be long and desperate. Without Virginia the Southern Confederacy could not have hoped to win its war for independence; with Virginia the Confederacy's hopes were not half bad, and they would get even better when people realized that Virginia would come equipped with Robert E. Lee. American history has known few events more momentous than the secession of Virginia, which turned what set out to be the simple suppression of a rebellion into a four-year cataclysm that shook America to the profoundest depths of its being. Once the proclamation was out, Virginia's departure was almost automatic.
People in Richmond were celebrating the fall of Fort Sumter before they saw Lincoln's proclamation, and a mass meeting on April 15 resolved "that we rejoice with high, exultant, heartfelt joy at the triumph of the Southern Confederacy over the accursed government at Washington."8 In the midst of this jubilation came the news that the accursed government expected Virginia to provide three regiments of infantry for the purpose of destroying the joyously congratulated Confederacy. To a proud tidewater people who had seen Yankee coercion in the mere fact that the United States flag had been flying over a fort in South Carolina, this call for troops—this obvious, bluntly stated determination to make war—looked like coercion triply distilled and outrageously unbearable. Virginia's refusal to join the Confederacy during the winter had never meant anything more than a desire to wait and see, a thin hope that the deep South might yet get all it wanted without having to establish a brand-new nation. Having waited, Virginia now had seen; the thin little hope was dead; and Virginia would be out of the Union just as soon as the most meager formalities could be attended to.
Virginia's Governor Letcher gave abundant warning of what was to come when, on April 16, he sent Lincoln a reply to the request for militia.
"In reply to this communication," said the governor, "I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me for such an object—an object, in my judgment, not within the purview of the Constitution or the act of 1795—will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited toward the South."
As Governor Letcher felt, so felt most of the other border-state governors, and messages of angry defiance poured in on Lincoln as soon as his call for troops was received. From Kentucky, Governor Beriah Magoffin telegraphed: "Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern states." Governor John W. Ellis, of North Carolina, wired that the request for troops was so shocking that he could hardly believe it to be genuine: it was both a violation of the Constitution and a "gross usurpation of power," he would have no part of it, and "you can get no troops from North Carolina." From Governor Isham G. Harris, of Tennessee, came the statement: "Tennessee will not furnish a single man for purpose of coercion, but 50,000 if necessary, for the defense of our rights and those of our Southern brethren." Governor H. M. Rector, of Arkansas, said that his state would send no troops; the people of Arkansas would "defend to the last extremity their honor, lives and property against Northern mendacity and usurpation." And Governor Claiborne F. Jackson, of Missouri, refusing to join in "the unholy crusade," telegraphed to Lincoln that his call for troops was "illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with.'"-' It had seemed of the first importance to hold the border states in the Union, but within the week following Major Anderson's surrender it looked as if the border might go over to the Confederacy en bloc. The nation that was going to war to preserve its unity might well find the war lost before it had fairly begun.
Most important of all was Virginia; and in Virginia, it quickly developed, the overwhelming majority of the people (east of the Blue Ridge, at any rate) felt precisely as Governor Letcher felt. Virginia's secession convention had never adjourned, and the call for troops galvanized it into quick action. On April 17 the convention passed an ordinance of secession. Technically, this would become effective only if a majority of the voters of the state ratified it at a special election called for May 23, but by now there was not the slightest chance that the voters would reject it and everyone took it for granted that Virginia had made an irrevocable decision. Until the action at Fort Sumter, there had been a good Unionist majority in the convention, but Delegate W. C. Rives wrote to a friend in Boston that "Lincoln's unlucky and ill-conceived proclamation" had caused an immediate reversal. The ordinance passed by a vote of 88 to 55, most of the pro-Union votes being cast by delegates from the western part of the state, beyond the mountains. Governor Letcher promptly issued a proclamation pointing out that seven states had already "solemnly resumed the power granted by them to the United States," asserting that Lincoln's call for troops was unconstitutional and a grave threat to Virginia, and summoning all of the state's volunteer regiments or companies in the state to stand by for an immediate call to active duty.10
The governor was moving fast, but the people of Virginia were moving even faster. Some of the military units Governor Letcher was talking about had not only assembled ahead of time but were on the move to smite the Yankees by the time he got out his proclamation. Henry A. Wise had been governor of Virginia at the time of the John Brown affair— had questioned the old man after the collapse of the uprising, and had in effect caused Brown to be convicted of treason and hanged—and the Fort Sumter crisis and what followed it turned his mind immediately to Harper's Ferry. On the evening of April 15, before Governor Letcher had even had time to make his defiant reply to Lincoln's demand for troops, Wise arranged a conference, in Richmond, of as many militia officers as he could find, and worked out a plan to get an armed force into Harper's Ferry to seize the government arsenal there. With this advance planning, a force of perhaps 1000 armed men was put in motion the moment the convention passed the ordinance of secession, and by the evening of April 18 this force was drawn up within four miles of the historic little town.
United States authority at the arsenal was represented by First Lieutenant Roger Jones and forty-two regular infantrymen. (By one of the remarkable coincidences common to this war, Lieutenant Jones was a cousin of Robert E. Lee.) It was utterly impossible for this company to stay there
; not only were the Federals badly outnumbered, but Harper's Ferry (as other officers were to discover, later in the war) was practically indefensible anyway. The town lay at the bottom of a cup, with high mountain ridges on every side, and unless its garrison could hold all of these ridges, which would take a very large force, an assailant could shell the place into submission without much trouble. Jones set fire to the arsenal and armory that night and put his command on the road for Pennsylvania, and the next morning the Virginia troops marched in. The government buildings had been destroyed, but the machinery with which military rifles were made was not badly damaged, and it was promptly moved farther south to make arms for the Confederacy. Several thousand rifle barrels and gun locks were salvaged, and the Virginians settled down to hold Harper's Ferry and the country roundabout. In a short time they got a new commander—an ungainly professor from the Virginia Military Institute, a cold-eyed West Pointer who had fought in the Mexican War and who turned out to be a secretive and hard-boiled stickler for discipline; a colonel in Virginia's service by the name of Thomas Jonathan Jackson.11
It had been just one week since Beauregard's guns opened on Fort Sumter, and already Virginia was in the war. Either Lincoln had discounted Virginia's action in advance, or (which seems much more probable) he had grossly overestimated the amount of Unionist sentiment in this and other border states. Neither Lincoln nor Seward had been able to see that this Union sentiment was purely conditional; it existed as long as no strain was put upon it, but when a real test came it fell apart. The emotional drive was all-important, and in this part of the country the Government of the United States, the very concept of the United States as a nation, could look like an interfering third party standing between a man and the object of his deepest loyalty. . . . The fury was on the land, and men all over America were responding to impulses that came up from the greatest depths.