Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  Douglas fought a last, heroic, useless campaign. Lincoln won only 39 per cent of the popular vote, but he carried the majority of Northern and Western states with a plurality. He did not carry a single state in the South. When the news of his election reached Charleston, the process of secession was immediately set going.

  In state after southern state conventions were summoned, bypassing the state assemblies and thus revolutionizing the state governments as the Committees of Correspondence had revolutionized the colonial governments eighty-five years previously. The loyalists struggled, but except in the Upper South they did so in vain. In December, South Carolina formally seceded from the United States, to be followed at once by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. These states next sent delegates to Montgomery, Alabama, to found a new inter-state government. Theoretically each seceding state could have become an independent country; but it seemed wiser to federate, as it has seemed wise to those earlier Founding Fathers of 1776: in adopting this course the Southerners showed how, in spite of everything, they were still intensely American. The Confederate States of America – usually known as the Confederacy – was announced to the world, in a document that was not quite as memorable as the Declaration of Independence, on 4 February 1861. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was to be President. The C S Constitution was issued on 11 March: it strikingly resembled that of the US.

  These events struck the North flat with amazement. The Union of the American States was such a profound commitment; the pride in the achievements of the American Revolution was so enormous; the belief in the promises of liberty, equality and property if America held together was so deep, that it seemed impossible that American citizens could really mean to destroy what the President-elect called ‘the last, best hope of Earth’. The Republicans had never believed that the threat to secede was serious: they had dismissed it as an electioneering trick. Even after the event they could not quite take it in, and hoped against hope, indeed against reason, that the Unionist majority in the South would reassert itself as it had in the past. But now there was no Union majority in the South.

  The winter months passed in a desperate frenzy of schemes to restore normality. Seward had one, so did Charles Francis Adams, so did Senator Crittenden (he came from Henry Clay’s Kentucky and hoped to repeat Clay’s triumphs). But the Senators and Representatives of the seceding states had withdrawn when their states went out, and the Northerners, finding the foe absent, seized the opportunity to pass a new, protectionist tariff, which would have outraged the cotton South had it still regarded itself as part of the Union. The Morrill Tariff (named after its chief planner) perhaps shows that subconsciously members of Congress knew that the secession was real, and aspired to be permanent.

  The lapse in time between the election in early November and Lincoln’s entry into office in March was unfortunate. Until then Buchanan remained President and had the duty of grappling with a crisis that threatened to shade from being a demonstration to being a rebellion to being a war. He proved as incapable as ever. Helplessly he allowed the secessionists to eliminate all Union presence from the Confederacy. The American government had always been such a loose, devolved, feeble affair that this was very easy: apart from the post and customs offices, there was little to remove save certain more or less unfinished or obsolete military and naval posts. The inland and most of the coastal ones fell immediately into Confederate hands; but at two points the Unionists could hold out – at Fort Pickens, off the Florida coast, and at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour. This last quickly became the emotional focus of the crisis for both sides. The little fort lay right in the jaws of the Confederacy. It was temptingly weak, for it had been built for defence against a sea attack, not a land one, and it was both undermanned and ill-supplied. Its jaunty flag, fluttering the formerly sacred colours of the United States right under their noses, was a deep affront to the seceders, otherwise giddy with joy and confidence; while its presence at such a point was a matter of hope and reassurance to the North. Fort Pickens, which was much more defensible (it was to continue in US hands throughout the years following), was soon overlooked: attention was obsessively directed at Charleston.

  Buchanan dithered, and would no doubt have gone on doing so – would even have allowed Fort Sumter to fall unresisting – but for the determination of his Attorney-General, Edwin Stanton (1814–69) of Ohio, appointed to replace a seceding Southerner. Arrogant, energetic, certain he was right, Stanton insisted that Sumter must be retained and if necessary be resupplied and reinforced. When Lincoln took the oath of office on 4 March the fort was still in United States hands; Virginia and the other states of the Upper South had still not left the Union; not a shot had been fired. Perhaps peace might still be preserved, but tension was rapidly mounting.

  The Presidential oath commits him who takes it to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and with almost no exception all the Presidents, even the feeblest, have regarded it very seriously. Abraham Lincoln was the opposite of feeble, and on taking the oath he explained, in his first inaugural address, what he understood by it. ‘The power confided to me,’ he said, ‘will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts’; for his pledge to protect the government was registered in heaven. In this way a line was drawn, a warning was issued. But the rest of his speech was an attempt to show the South, in its own terms, that it was safe under a Republican administration and that therefore secession was unnecessary. Read today, what is most striking, next to Lincoln’s desperate earnestness, is the way in which his very effort to be heard by the South reveals the gap between the two sides. Lincoln minimized that gap as best he could, saying it was no more than a dispute as to whether or not slavery should be extended; he pointed out that the Constitution was inviolate; he indicated that he would accept Crittenden’s proposal to write a guarantee of slavery into the Constitution; he pledged the Republicans to leave slavery alone; he remarked, without a smile, that there was very little damage that any administration could do in four years, and he held up as a beacon to the South one of his deepest beliefs:

  A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or despotism.

  Surely the South would see this, and cease its rejection of him and of the majority which had made him President. At the very least, let it do nothing in a hurry. ‘Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.’

  The speech did the orator credit, but it could not find its mark. For one thing Lincoln could not quite hide his feeling that secession was not only wrong but frivolous. For another, he offered the South nothing but the status quo, of which even the Crittenden Amendment was only a reinforcement. He stuck to his refusal to countenance slavery expansion; and he did not recognize either the right to secede or the independence of the Confederacy. He did not say he would not fight, either: only that he would not assail the seceders. He did not lay bare all his thought: but behind his praise of the American system could be felt his commitment to human equality, his love of his country, his hatred of slavery. In essence, he did not offer the South the slightest reassurance. Even if he had, it is doubtful if the seceding states, buoyant in the excitement of their new Confederacy, would have paid any attention. They had finished with Uncle Sam.

  For the next few weeks Lincoln was besieged by the mob of office-seekers that assailed every new President, and as a sensible party leader he devoted much time to them; but though they wearied him they did not distract him from the question of Sumter. He adopted Stanton’s policy, but in his own fashion: he played for time. He hoped that, if it came to a showdown, he could keep the border states on his side. For this and other reasons he was determined not to fire the first shot; and he hoped against hope that no shots would be necessary. But he did not
order the evacuation of Fort Sumter.

  The matter was out of his hands. Many announcements were made by Southern leaders; many furtive negotiations were undertaken, some with the connivance of Seward, now Secretary of State. But since the Confederates had no intention of withdrawing the secession ordinances they had little choice, once it became clear that Lincoln had no intention of dropping the claims of the Union. A newborn nation, seething with bombastic pride, could not tolerate the impertinence of Sumter. General Beauregard received his orders; he mounted batteries against the fort, and on 12 April he opened his bombardment.

  Mrs Chesnut and the other ladies of Charleston were appalled by the man-made thunder that crashed and reverberated incessantly through their town: they had never heard anything like it in their lives, and for a moment they glimpsed the nature of the abyss to which the slave states had been moving so recklessly for so long. In spite of the noise, no one was killed: Major Anderson, in command at the fort, was too skilful a soldier to let his men expose themselves. The fortifications were too good to be shattered immediately, but after a day and a night they could no longer be defended. Anderson asked for terms, which were granted; the stars and stripes were lowered, and the garrison marched out with the honours of war. War it was indeed; though how terrible was not yet clear.

  15 The War About Slavery 1861–5

  ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ bold Moses said,

  ‘Let my people go!

  Or else I’ll strike your first-born dead!

  Let my people go!’

  Go down Moses! ‘Way down in Egypt’s land:

  Tell old Pharaoh, Let My People Go!

  Contraband Hymn, 1861

  If the attack on Fort Sumter settled that there would be a war, it also largely determined what sort of a war it would be. Lincoln and the North never hesitated in their response to the event: this was rebellion, and would have to be suppressed. On 15 April the President issued a proclamation announcing a blockade of all Southern ports and calling for a force of 75,000 volunteers to restore federal authority in the South. As a man who believed in the permanence of the Union he could do no less. But to the Upper South he seemed to be doing a great deal too much. The choice before these states was indeed agonizing. Virginia, for example, had refused to follow the example of the Cotton Kingdom because she did not see Lincoln’s election as any particular danger: she was well used to the ups and downs of two-party politics and was, besides, deeply loyal to the Union which she had done so much to create. But neither she nor any other of the Southern states understood that term in Mr Lincoln’s sense. For them the states came first; the Union was a limited compact, as the old anti-Federalists had taught, and the states retained their sovereignty, including the right to secede if they saw fit. Above all, the Union was one of consent: the essence of the Constitution and its checks and balances was that the majority should not be able, legitimately, to coerce a minority. As the North Carolina Standard had put it the previous autumn, ‘a Constitutional Union is the only one worth preserving… A Union of force, cemented and kept together by force, and perhaps by blood, is not the Union of the Constitution.’ So Lincoln’s proclamation was promptly followed by the secession of Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri might have gone too, but the Unionist forces and the power of the federal government were just sufficient to keep them loyal. ‘I hope to have God on my side, I must have Kentucky,’ said Lincoln, for without that state the North risked being split in two, and Washington might be untenable. As it was, the second secession, vastly increasing the area and population of the Confederacy, made Lincoln’s task nearly impossible.

  Few great nations have been less ready in any way for war than were the Americans, North and South, in 1861. The military potential of both sides was enormous, or the struggle could never have dragged on for four years; but at the outset the means for realizing that potential were almost non-existent. True, the United States had founded an official military academy at West Point on the Hudson river in 1802. This institution had done so well that its graduates provided almost all the effective military leadership on either side during the Civil War, and did so from the start: Beauregard and Anderson were both West Pointers. Nor was it only their formal education which trained them: the men of the Academy had run the army during the decades of peace, had fought Indians and Mexicans in the occasional small war, and in some cases, such as that of George McClellan, who had been a railroad official, had gained further valuable experience in civilian life. As was quickly to be shown, in short, the professional American Officer Corps compared favourably in quality with any other in the world, except perhaps the Prussian.

  But there were very few of these professionals, though there were more than peacetime America had been able to employ, at least as soldiers. To most of their countrymen titles like ‘Colonel’ and ‘Major’ were merely honorific, dealt out on the frontier even more lavishly than handles such as ‘Judge’ and ‘Squire’. Soldiering meant parading in a fancy uniform on the Fourth of July and shirking militia training all the rest of the year. War, when it did not mean hunting down Indian villages, meant brilliant cavalry charges in red trousers, sweeping the paltry foe before you; it never lasted more than a few weeks. Morale, whether civilian or military, meant the confident assumption that nobody could beat an American, not even another American. As to problems of diplomacy, logistics, supply or finance, they were ignored, or at best dealt with by such slogans as ‘Cotton is King’. Even the educated, even the politicians, knew little better. Abraham Lincoln was wise enough to see that he had everything to learn about his duties as Commander-in-Chief: he took to studying books on tactics and strategy in odd moments. Jefferson Davis was misguided enough to suppose that some fighting in the Mexican War and a term as Secretary of War in Pierce’s Cabinet had taught him all he needed to know – taught him enough to teach his generals. In this vanity he was much the more representative of the two leaders.1

  The first months of the war were, therefore, chiefly shaped by the general unpreparedness. Perhaps the most important occurrences were the attempts by Lincoln and Davis to say what it was all about. In July Lincoln sent a message to Congress in which he began his long series of attempts to persuade his countrymen and the world that this was a war for democracy, a war to show whether a constitutional republic, ‘a government of the people by the same people’, could maintain its integrity against a rebellion. Jefferson Davis, in a message to the Confederate Congress, identified his cause with states’ rights: with the right of a state to secede and the right of a minority to protect itself against a tyrannous majority. But even in such a solemn message, designed to put the best face on Southern actions, he was not able to conceal the connection between his political doctrines and slavery. The Northern majority was tyrannous, he said, because it actively opposed slavery, and so secession was practically justified as well as constitutionally proper. The truth was that ‘states’ rights’ had evolved, as a creed, from the necessity to protect the peculiar institution. Virginia, for example, was not a cotton state, but she was a slave state, economically dependent on her relations with the other slave states, which purchased her surplus Negroes. If slavery was going to war, states’ rights was a splendid excuse for Virginia to enlist on her customers’ side. Not that it appeared that way to her people. Many of them – for example, Robert E. Lee – had freed their slaves; but when the war came they rallied to what was still their truest country. Lee, the favourite of General Winfield Scott, was offered the command of the United States army as well as that of seceding Virginia; he debated the matter with himself all night, before going with his state. But, like it or not, and he did not like it, he thereby committed himself – very effectively, as would soon be shown – to the military defence of slavery.

  Slavery, then, was the central issue of the war from the start, though it was not at first convenient for Lincoln to say so. Not only was there far too much anti-black feeling in the North, there was
the attitude of the loyal slave-holders of Kentucky and Maryland to consider (not that they were very sincerely loyal: many of them slipped off South to join the Confederates). He therefore laid enormous stress on the Union; it was for that he fought. As he was to say in August 1862, ‘My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery.’ It was to save the Union that, in the spring of 1861, thousands of young men flocked to Washington.

  What did the Union mean to them? Curiously, this crucial question is seldom asked by American historians, and never answered satisfactorily. It is, to them, too obvious to bear thought. But non-Americans must consider it.