The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln

by Abraham Lincoln

  A long controversy had been going on since the previous December between the Federal Government and South Carolina over the Federal fortifications around Charleston. The key to Charleston was Fort Sumter which commanded the entrance to the harbor. South Carolina was determined to take over this fort; the Northern Government was equally determined to hold it. An attempt had been made in January to send provisions to Sumter by steamer. This steamer, the Star of the West, had been fired upon by the Confederates and driven away from the port. Sumter had been holding out ever since. Its little garrison, under the command of Major Robert Anderson, was now nearly at the point of starvation. The fort either had to be supplied with provisions or surrendered.

  General Scott had already given his opinion that it would be practically impossible to hold Sumter. On March 15, Lincoln asked advice from his Cabinet. Only Blair and Chase felt that an effort should be made to provision the fort. Nearly all the forts, navy yards and Federal buildings in the South were already in possession of the Confederates. Sumter was not of great importance, but the months-old controversy over it had given it an unduly prominent place in the news. The North could not afford to let the fort go because of the unfavorable publicity that would be incurred; South Carolina was eager to get possession of the key to her Charleston harbor—she could not be regarded as independent so long as the waterway to her major city was controlled by the North.

  Lincoln still made no move. He could not decide just what should be done about the impossibly difficult situation. To send supplies was to invite armed attack and war; to withhold them was to starve out the garrison and compel surrender. Time was working on the side of the South. The matter could not be delayed indefinitely. The Confederate Provisional Congress had already authorized the raising of 100,000 volunteers, floated an internal war loan, established an official navy and was even sending a commission to Europe to seek recognition as a nation.

  On March 29, Lincoln again took a poll of Cabinet opinion on Sumter. There was some shift in favor of reinforcement, but the Cabinet was still not in agreement on taking a definite stand. Lincoln himself was, however, by no means convinced that the matter could be settled simply by letting the fort fall into the hands of the rebels. In fact he had already given orders to prepare an expedition which might or might not be used. Then on April 1, he received a document which, if it did nothing else, made him realize that he would have to fight to hold the Presidency just as hard as he had fought to obtain it. This was a confidential memorandum from Seward discreetly entitled “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration.”

  This subtle bit of prodding indicated that the administration had not yet adopted a policy domestic or foreign; that it would be tactically desirable to “change the question before the public from one upon slavery, or about slavery, for a question upon union or disunion.” Seward’s formula for accomplishing this very desirable end was to abandon Sumter but to “maintain every fort and possession in the South.” Then came one of the most breath-taking suggestions ever made by a high officer of the Government. Seward calmly proposed that the United States should deliberately provoke a war with Europe in order to unite her own antagonistic sections.

  Someone, of course, had to do all this—either the President or some member of his Cabinet. Seward modestly closed by saying: “It is not in my special province; but I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.”

  This ingenuous advice must have been galling to Lincoln. His Secretary of State was not only suggesting that the country be plunged into an utterly unjustified foreign war, but was intimating that perhaps it would be better if he, the experienced and worldly wise Seward, take over the absolute control of its destinies.

  Actually this was not all that Seward was doing to bring added trouble to an administration already overwhelmed with disaster. He had been in “indirect” communication with three men sent as commissioners by the Confederacy to sue for peaceable separation. These men had no official standing in the eyes of the United States which was certainly not ready to consider the Confederacy as a nation with the right to send agents. Nevertheless, Seward had let these men believe that Sumter would eventually be surrendered, although no such policy had been adopted. There were two unfortunate results from Seward’s rashness in dealing with the unofficial commissioners: a great deal of information leaked out and was transmitted to the South; when an attempt was made to provision Sumter, the South charged the Lincoln administration with bad faith, even though Seward, of course, had no right to make commitments of any kind.

  Lincoln was probably uninformed as to how far Seward had gone with the Confederate commissioners, but Seward’s “Thoughts for the President’s Consideration” required an immediate and positive reply. Lincoln could not afford to antagonize his new and in many ways really capable Secretary of State, but he did have to put him in his place. The weakness Lincoln had displayed during his first few weeks in office immediately vanished. The answer he gave to Seward was a masterpiece of political strategy combined with unyielding firmness. He gently reminded Seward that his first inaugural address had been a statement of internal policy and that he meant to stick to it—particularly to the pledge “to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the Government.” He said that he did not “perceive how the reinforcement of Fort Sumter would be done on a slavery or party issue, while that of Fort Pickens would be on a more national and patriotic one.” He ignored completely Seward’s suggestion about provoking a foreign war but said that whatever must be done would be done by the President himself. And then he very sensibly buried the whole affair so that no word of it ever came out while the two men involved were still alive. These tactics gave Seward a new respect for the President; the two men thenceforth drew closer to each other.

  The problem of Sumter was more difficult than the one that had arisen with Seward, but it, too, had to be met and settled. Lincoln moved forward rapidly now. He determined to provision the fort, but he would send in no reinforcements or munitions unless the place was attacked. On April 6, he ordered a relief expedition to sail.16 As a last-minute gesture of conciliation, he notified the Governor of South Carolina of his intentions. Instead of conciliating, however, this served only to warn. When the fleet arrived off Charleston in the early morning of April 12, the Confederates gave word to fire on the fort. At 4:30 A.M. a shell rose from a mortar battery on the shore, curved high in the air and exploded over the walls of Sumter. The American Civil War had begun.

  The firing continued for thirty-six hours, strangely enough without loss of life on either side. On the second day, buildings inside the fort were set on fire by incendiary shells. In order to prevent the powder magazines from exploding, nearly all the powder had to be thrown into the sea. With ammunition almost exhausted, the garrison agreed to surrender. On the next day, Sunday, April 14, 1861, the flag was hauled down, and the fort passed into the hands of the Confederates.

  On that day, in quick answer to the attack on Sumter, Lincoln drafted with his own hand a proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers and summoning Congress to meet in extraordinary session on July 4. Douglas visited him in the afternoon to pledge his active support of the Union in the war. The two men consulted on military matters—Douglas had an excellent strategic mind and might have risen high in the army. A few days later, the Little Giant left for Illinois to rally Northern Democrats to the Union cause. Hardly more than a month later he was dead; a mysterious malady, perhaps brought on by the physical exhaustion caused by his active pro-Union tour, cut short his life when he was only forty-eight years old. The stage was now clear for Lincoln to dominate the national scene.

  THE WAR BEGINS

  News of the firing on Sumter was received in the North with incredulity at first—then with rage. Over the week end the war news spread across the land, running along the telegraph wires to far-distant places, radiating out from towns to villages and thence to isolated farms, to logging camps, to wilderness huts. Men g
athered at railroad stations where the rapid stutter of telegraph-receiving instruments brought the latest information from Washington. The President’s call for volunteers, which was published on Monday, April 15, was responded to with enthusiasm—many more than 75,000 men came forward. Everybody felt that the war would be a short one; the rebellion of a few recalcitrant slaveholders would be put down quickly.

  Men volunteered in the South as readily as in the North. The South, too, expected to win quickly. She would have her independence and be able to lead her own existence as a new nation. Yet in neither the North nor the South were the people solidly united on the issue at hand. The great Appalachian mountain chain that runs down through the South was the home of people who held no slaves, who profited in no way at all from a slave economy. These people were fiercely individualistic, scorning plantation owners and city dwellers alike. They wanted no part in the War, and many of them were determined to stay with the Union—or in some cases—to remain stubbornly neutral.

  In the North, along the edges of the border states, in the newer Middle Western sections where people from the South had settled in pioneer country, and even in such states as New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, there were thousands of men who opposed the Northern cause, openly and secretly. In the capital city of Washington, there were hundreds of men in governmental positions who held allegiance to the South; the more honorable of them resigned from their posts immediately; others remained to send out information and to do all that they could to obstruct the Northern military campaign.

  On the whole, the South stood together better than the North did, although most of the Southern people had nothing to gain from the war. Less than seven percent of the white population there held ten or more slaves—and only these large slaveowners had been able to make slave labor pay. Men who held a few slaves lived on the thin edge of bankruptcy. The poor whites who made up the greater part of the population lived at a low subsistence level. Yet all these disparate elements were by one means or another welded together to wage the war. Some men—the wealthier ones—joined the army because they were convinced that slavery was desirable; others joined because of the example set by their neighbors. The rallying cry of states’ rights was a potent force among the more intelligent; the slogan “Fight to keep the niggers in their places” worked with the more ignorant. The real tragedy of the South was that so many of its people were willing to fight and die in a War that would benefit so few of them even if they won it.

  In the South, only some of the people in the border states and in the mountain regions held out against secession after the shots fired on Sumter clarified the many counter issues and made war certain. In the North, for all its initial enthusiasm, there were men who fought the war policy of the Government through all four years of battle. For one thing, Northern men had been used to free speech, accustomed to violent controversy among themselves over political matters. The moral issue against slavery and anger against the South for breaking up the Union helped to unify the North, but there were still many Northerners who cared nothing about freeing the slaves or holding the Union together. Political ties formed during the Democratic party’s long reign served, too, to make Northern Democrats feel that perhaps the South was not entirely unjustified in her stand on slavery and disunion. Areas that had been solidly in favor of the Democrats were disloyal areas in the North. Copperheadism flourished there; treasonable activities of all kinds were prevalent in these sections. Naturally there were many loyal Democrats like Douglas in the North—but there were no Republicans at all in the South.

  The South lost no time in following up her victory at Sumter. Virginia passed an ordinance of secession on April 17; several thousand hastily assembled volunteers moved on Harper’s Ferry to seize the arsenal there with its 15,000 rifles. On the eighteenth, the Federal officer in command of the arsenal had to set it on fire in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the insurgents.

  Virginia’s secession immediately placed Washington in great danger. The city was open to easy invasion from the south; if Maryland also proved to be hostile to the Northern cause it would be almost impossible to hold the capital. Everyone in Washington waited apprehensively to see what move Maryland would make. The only railroad leading into Washington from the north passed through Baltimore—if this railroad and the telegraph wires that paralleled it were cut, Washington would be isolated.

  Troops were badly needed to defend the city. There were only 16,000 men in the regular United States Army at this time, and most of them were in far-flung outposts in unsettled territory. On the seventeenth a few hundred militiamen from Pennsylvania reached Washington safely. Then, on the morning of April 19, a long train carrying one thousand armed men from the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment and nearly as many more unarmed Pennsylvania volunteers, arrived at the northern terminal in Baltimore. The first eight cars were drawn through the city streets by teams of horses while a huge crowd of Southern sympathizers gathered. By the time the ninth car came along, the crowd was in an ugly mood. Someone threw a stone at the windows of the slowly moving car. The sound of breaking glass inspired the crowd to pelt the windows with more stones. Revolver shots were fired. The soldiers, at their officers’ command, lay down on the floor of the car and offered no resistance. The car managed to reach the southern terminal, but it was the last one to get through. The crowd piled stones and scrap iron on the right of way, making it impossible for any more cars to pass. The soldiers still left at the northern terminal had to march through the streets to force their way to the Washington station. The mob fell upon them; men on both sides started to fire—the militiamen, grimly fighting their way, reached the terminal only after they had left four of their comrades lying dead on the streets.

  The train pulled out of the south station as a final burst of fire from the soldiers killed a prominent man in the crowd. The infuriated mob then rushed to the Philadelphia terminal, where the unarmed Pennsylvania volunteers were still waiting in the train. Some of these men jumped out of the cars and were attacked. The train was hastily backed out of the station in order to escape the shower of stones and brickbats hurled at it. Baltimore was in a turmoil for the rest of the day. A huge secession meeting was held that night, at which it was made evident that no more troops would be allowed to pass through the city.

  The train carrying the Sixth Massachusetts arrived in Washington during the late afternoon. The wounded were unloaded on stretchers, and the survivors were marched to the Capitol, where they were quartered in the Senate Chamber. Even the White House was used as a barracks that night—a group of Kansas men recruited in Washington were placed in the East Room to serve as a guard.

  This was the beginning of a week of terror the like of which Washington had not witnessed since 1814, when the British had captured and burned the city. Each day that went by made Washington’s position seem more and more hopeless. On the nineteenth, Lincoln issued a proclamation of blockade, declaring that all commerce to and from Southern ports would be stopped. On the twentieth, the Gosport Navy Yard near Norfolk, Virginia, had to be burned to save it from the rebels. Most of the ships had already been scuttled by disloyal officers stationed there. The North was placed in the position of having issued orders of blockade without having a fleet adequate to enforce them. On this same day railroad bridges near Baltimore were destroyed; railroad traffic ceased, and then, on the evening of Sunday, April 21, telegraphic communication with the North was cut off. The last message to come through from Baltimore simply said that the insurgents were taking over the telegraph office there.

  On Monday morning, Washington was entirely isolated, in immediate danger of attack from Virginia and without enough troops to be able to put up much resistance if invasion were attempted. The Lincoln administration seemed likely to be as short-lived as its enemies had predicted. The President paced anxiously up and down the silent halls of the White House, occasionally going to a window to see if any relief ships were in sight. On the Virginia side
of the river he could make out a flag flying from the top of a building there. It was a Confederate flag, and he had good reason to believe that a large body of men were gathering around it in preparation for an assault on Washington. As night fell, he could see the watch-fires of the Confederacy burning on the hills, twinkling brightly under the quiet April sky.

  Washington slept on its arms. Men stayed at their posts in Government buildings lest an attempt be made to seize Federal property during the night. Sandbags were piled up around entranceways; barricades were erected inside the halls. There had been a general exodus of Southern sympathizers during the last few days, but no one knew how many of them might still be waiting in the city to rise and join a concerted attack on the capital.

  News had been received that men from the Seventh Regiment of New York and troops from Rhode Island and Massachusetts had been sent by sea to Annapolis, and that they had arrived there on Monday. They were expected in Washington on Tuesday. The railroad had been put out of commission near Annapolis, but the troops had only to march twenty miles to Annapolis Junction, where they could meet the main line from Baltimore, which was still intact from this point to Washington. Tuesday, however, brought no sign of the expected troops. Nerves were overwrought from long waiting. The city streets were almost deserted; people stayed inside their houses not knowing what might happen; stores and business places remained closed. Even the President’s strong will was cracking. During the afternoon, after the day’s work was over, he resumed his worried pacing up and down the floor of the Executive office. Finally he went to the window, and oblivious of people still in the room, said out loud: “Why don’t they come? Why don’t they come?”