Coming Fury, Volume 1

by Bruce Catton

  The peculiar institution, even as it existed in the deepest heart of the cotton belt, was exceedingly fragile. It could endure only in a section that was of one mind about it, about its value, its Tightness, its essential place in a community where all men’s interests were as one. The new Republican administration in Washington might indeed, as Lincoln said, lack either the power or the desire to reach into this region and interfere, but the Southerners who now demanded secession as a matter of self-preservation were entirely right on the one important point—the mere existence of a Federal administration hostile to slavery spelled eventual doom for the institution even though the doom might be delayed for a great many years. The South’s monolithic unity on the matter would be broken, slowly but certainly. In the border states the institution already showed signs of withering on the vine. Sooner or later, the Southern white man who owned no slaves (and he was very much in the majority) would come to see that what was good for the slaveholder was not necessarily good for him … and that would be the beginning of an inevitable end.

  So a sound instinct moved the men who refused to let secession wait until the new administration had committed some openly hostile act. The votes to make an anti-slavery man President existed, at last, and they had been cast, and the fact that the Republicans had not been able to win a majority in either house of Congress made little difference. A turning point had been reached, and if the preservation of slavery topped all other concerns in importance, then the only thing to do was to leave the Union as quickly as might be.

  Among those who saw this was Jefferson Davis, who had hoped that the deep South might be able to remain in the Union on its own terms, and who was meditating at his Mississippi home on the meaning of Lincoln’s election. To R. B. Rhett, Jr., a few days after this election, Davis wrote a veiled letter, confessing that he doubted the strength of secession sentiment in some states as of that particular moment. If a convention of the slave states were called, he believed, the proposition to secede from the Union would probably fail. At the same time, there did exist a powerful community of interest among the cotton-planting states—that booming area of factory farms where cotton mass-produced by slaves was so immensely profitable—and sooner or later these states were certain to get together; united, they would be perfectly capable of defending their own interests. The newer cotton states doubtless would be slow to act, although in the end they would be bound to follow the older states, and Davis had believed all along that they should be brought into co-operation before the leadership concluded to ask “for a popular decision upon a new policy and relation to the nations of the earth.” Nevertheless, Davis felt that if South Carolina should resolve to secede before that sort of co-operation could be attained—going out independently, leaving even such states as Georgia and Alabama and Louisiana in the Union, without any assurance that they would follow—in that case “there appears to me to be no advantage in waiting until the government has passed into hostile hands and men have become familiarized to that injurious and offensive perversion of the general government from the ends for which it was established.”7

  Although the leaders in South Carolina had pretty well determined on their course before this letter from Davis came in, what Davis said and the fact that he said it at all had much meaning. Stephens had shown that even a devoted Unionist would in the end go along with his state; now Davis was showing that a conservative and a constitutionalist would go along with the fire-eaters, if need be.

  In the face of all of this, what was a President-elect to do? Lincoln himself did not know. It seemed to him (while office-hunters swarmed about him like blow flies, crowding the little room in the state house almost to suffocation, leaving him scant time for deep thoughts about statecraft) that his best course was to keep quiet. Alexander Stephens had urged that the right word from Lincoln just now “could indeed be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver,’ ” but the right word was very hard to find and in any case there were many men ready to twist it out of shape even if it could be said. The young newspaper correspondent Henry Villard, observing things in the Illinois state house, was shocked by Lincoln’s appearance, thinking the man showed unbearable strain: “Always cadaverous, his aspect is now almost ghastly. His position is wearing him terribly.” It did not seem to Villard that Lincoln had enough firmness for the position he was entering: “The times demand a Jackson.”8 Yet Douglas had spoken in Jacksonian terms, at Norfolk and at Raleigh, and after he had spoken, the South had gone along with Breckinridge; possibly the situation had passed the point where it could be set straight by the Jackson touch.

  It may be that the mounting pressure for offices, the increasing evidence that there were many among the multitudes who wanted a political victory to bring tangible political rewards, made it hard for the man in Springfield to tell the difference between revolutionary fervor and a simple political maneuver. Donn Piatt, a Cincinnati journalist, interviewed Lincoln before November was over, found him not cynical but at least profoundly skeptical, one who with easy good humor took a low view of human nature and believed nothing until he actually saw it. “This low estimate of humanity,” wrote Piatt, “blinded him to the South. He could not understand that men would get up in their wrath and fight for an idea. He considered the movement South as a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians and meant solely to frighten the North. He believed that when the leaders saw their efforts in that direction were unavailing the tumult would subside.” A little later, seeing Lincoln in Chicago, Piatt told him that the Southern people were deeply in earnest and said that he was doubtful whether Lincoln could be inaugurated at Washington. Lincoln laughed at him and said that the fall in the price of pork at Cincinnati had affected Piatt’s judgment; and when Piatt retorted that in ninety days the land would be white with the tents of soldiers, Lincoln remarked that “we won’t jump that ditch until we come to it.” After a pause, Lincoln added: “I must run the machine as I find it.”9

  It is probable that in talking with Piatt, Lincoln did not give a full glimpse of his own thinking—and, indeed, Piatt confessed that he had gathered many of his impressions from what Mrs. Lincoln said rather than from anything Lincoln himself told him. Lincoln probably did begin by suspecting that the elaborate talk about secession was largely a bluff, meant to win concessions: and up to a certain point that had actually been the case—one of the controlling factors in the whole crisis was that an attempt to put on the political heat had got out of hand. But by the end of November, Lincoln was beginning to be aware of the real state of things. He would not have written to Alec Stephens as he had done if his attitude had been what Piatt thought it was, and he was clearly doing much more soul-searching about the government’s ability to defend its own integrity than he would have been doing if he supposed the Southern leaders were bluffing.

  Nobody was bluffing. The time for that had passed. What was done now and hereafter must be done in earnest, according to the best light a man could find. The trouble was that the lights were all imperfect. The election had clarified nothing. It simply meant that a nation which had spent a long generation arguing about slavery had grown tired of talk and wanted to see something done—without specifying what that something might be.

  6: Despotism of the Sword

  Winfield Scott was commanding general of the Army of the United States, an officer of higher rank (a lieutenant general by brevet) and more distinction than any American since George Washington. He had immense pride and he considered that his responsibilities were those not merely of a soldier but of an elder statesman, and in a time of crisis he would not hesitate to give gratuitous advice to the government which employed him. Even before Lincoln’s election he was worrying about the drift of things, and at the end of October it seemed to him that he should tell the President and the country how the Union might be preserved. He put his views down on paper, sent the result to President James Buchanan, gave a copy to Secretary of War John B. Floyd—who, as the general’s immediat
e superior, had not asked him to do anything of the kind—and saw to it that the document was circulated elsewhere.

  Scott’s letter was ponderous, confused, not far short of fantastic: yet it did help to compel men to face up to the unlimited potentialities which this strange campaign had developed. Quite correctly, Scott believed that secession was at hand. A Bell and Everett man himself, he did not think that Lincoln’s impending victory (he dated his letter October 29) really threatened “any unconstitutional violence of breach of law,” but trouble obviously was coming. He proceeded.

  “From a knowledge of our Southern population it is my solemn conviction that there is some danger of an early act of rashness preliminary to secession, viz, the seizure of some or all of the following posts: Forts Jackson and St. Philip, on the Mississippi, below New Orleans, both without garrisons; Fort Morgan, below Mobile, without a garrison; Forts Pickens and McKee [McRee], Pensacola Harbor, with an insufficient garrison for one; Fort Pulaski, below Savannah, without a garrison; Forts Moultrie and Sumter, Charleston harbor, the former with an insufficient garrison, the latter without any; and Fort Monroe, Hampton Roads, without a sufficient garrison. In my opinion all these works should be immediately so garrisoned as to make any attempt to take any one of them, by surprise or coup de main, ridiculous. With the army faithful to its allegiance, and the navy probably equally so, and with a Federal Executive, for the next twelve months, of firmness and moderation, which the country has a right to expect—moderation being an element of power not less than firmness—there is good reason to hope that the danger of secession may be made to pass away without one conflict of arms, one execution or one arrest for treason. In the meantime it is suggested that exports might be left perfectly free—and to avoid conflicts all duties on imports be collected outside of the cities, in forts or ships of war.”

  As the perplexed Buchanan remarked, “these were themes entirely foreign to a military report, and equally foreign from the official duties of the Commanding General.” But this was not all. If the Union fell apart, Scott wrote, “there would be no hope of reuniting the fragments except by the laceration and despotism of the sword.” Roaming far afield, he even suggested that it might be well to divide the nation into four separate confederacies—roughly, Northeast, Southeast, Northwest, and Southwest—the effect of which, he apparently believed, would be to isolate the cotton belt and make its conquest simpler. To Floyd, Scott sent a covering note urging that the commanders of such forts as were garrisoned be warned to be on their toes. He pointed out that the army had a total of five companies—one each at Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Augusta, and Baton Rouge—which might be used for reinforcements.1

  This did not strike the harassed President as especially helpful. As he remarked later, to try to garrison eight forts with five companies would have been an open confession of weakness, an invitation to secession rather than a preventative. Indeed, the entire United States Army at that moment numbered hardly more than 16,000 officers and men, and these were scattered all over the continental United States, guarding the frontiers, protecting emigrant trains, overawing contumacious Indians, and in general trying to do a very large job with inadequate means. Three years earlier, thinking only of frontiers and Indians and not dreaming that ornamental forts in drowsy harbors needed anything more than caretakers, Buchanan had urged Congress to add five new regiments to the army’s strength, but Congress had refused to do this and appropriations for the army had been going down—from $25,000,000 in 1858, high for the decade, to a little more than $16,000,000 for 1860. In plain fact, the United States was all but disarmed. It possessed 198 companies of regulars, and it had 183 of these on the frontier or in the empty West.

  General Emory Upton, analyzing this situation some years later, pointed out that to suppress Indians and guard inhabitants and emigrant trains in all the region west of the Mississippi, there was one soldier for every 120 square miles; to do whatever might be necessary in all the rest of the country there was one soldier for every 1300 square miles. Theoretically, the militia of course could be called on, and theoretically it could bring three million men to the colors, but in actual fact the militia “did not merit the name of a military force,” since it was destitute of instruction and training and very nearly destitute of equipment. The states could, to be sure, draw their quotas of arms from the War Department, but during the fifties the War Department was equipping the regulars with new weapons, and what was available for the states consisted very largely of material that was nearly obsolete. In any case, many of the states neglected to draw the weapons they might have had.

  The War Department itself slumbered in an easy placidity befitting this state of affairs. Its eight dominant bureaus were bound up in red tape and made practically senile by sheer age; of the officers who commanded these bureaus, all but one had been in service since the War of 1812, and several had held their posts for decades, happily contributing to the lethargic routine which slowed all activities down to a crawl. There were great leather-bound ledgers into which incoming letters were methodically copied; there were some scores of clerks, whose chief qualification for their jobs was that they wrote a fine legible hand. During 1860 Congress had bestirred itself slightly in regard to the army. It had increased the enlisted man’s ration of sugar and coffee, it had set up a commission to look into the course of instruction and system of discipline at West Point, and the Senate had ordered its Committee on Military Affairs (whose chairman was Jefferson Davis) to determine whether expenditures on the army might not further be reduced without detriment to the public service. As matters stood in the fall of 1860, the country could do almost anything with its army except fight with it. The obvious explanation for all of this was that nobody had supposed that it would have to fight at all.2

  Now General Scott was speaking up, demanding that empty forts be provided with garrisons, and President Buchanan felt that this request was illogical and impractical, which is not to be wondered at—especially in view of the fact that Buchanan was not a man who was easily brought to affirmative action under any circumstances. As a matter of fact, there is more to be said on Buchanan’s side than usually gets said, or listened to. He was a Doughface, as men used words then, a Northerner with Southern sympathies, and his cabinet was of very little help to him. His administration had been able to do nothing of any consequence except keep Stephen Douglas from being the presidential candidate of a united Democracy, and now it had to face the most outlandish domestic crisis in American history. The general of the armies was stepping far out of his proper sphere to give unwanted advice on high policy, and the worst of this was that with his uncertain vision the old soldier had seen one thing with great clarity—there was probably going to be a big fight, and something ought to be done to get ready for it.

  This was a time when most men were purblind. The tragedy of the leaders of the North had been that they could not see that a Republican victory would almost automatically mean secession of one or many of the states of the deep South; and the tragedy of the Southerners was that they were not able to see that secession would finally mean war. Neither side believed that the other side was deeply in earnest, and neither side was prepared to face the consequences of its own acts. Now the consequences were beginning to take shape, and the aged general saw what was coming and demanded that his government be prepared to fight. It was all dreadfully upsetting.

  The whole point of the Buchanan cabinet was that, like the President himself, it was qualified to do nothing of any consequence with great dignity. Now the heat was on, and there was going to be some sort of action, even if the best action the administration could devise might be to let things drift on toward catastrophe. Few presidents ever faced a harder task than Buchanan now faced.

  Lewis Cass, of Michigan, very old and very dignified and very stuffy, was Secretary of State, and Howell Cobb, of Georgia, who was not in the least aged or stuffy, was Secretary of the Treasury. John B. Floyd, of Virginia, was Secretary of War; a bum
bling incompetent who had permitted much corruption without (as would finally appear) being personally touched by very much of it, the man who held top command over an army that was about to do things not specified in the tables of organization. Isaac Toucey, of Connecticut, an amiable nonentity, was Secretary of the Navy (which was quite as crippled by declining appropriations as was the Army) and the forceful Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi, was Secretary of the Interior. Joseph Holt, of Kentucky, sour and limited but strongly pro-Union, was Postmaster General, and the Unionist Jeremiah Black, of Pennsylvania, was Attorney General. Cobb and Thompson and Floyd were devout Southerners, Toucey was either neutral or a cipher, and the rest were run-of-the-mill Northerners, some of them devoted, some of them less so. These were Buchanan’s closest advisers.

  If Buchanan had been a man of original force, this would not have mattered so much, but he was nothing of the kind. He was 69, and he was torn by two deep emotions—a strong, automatic sympathy for the South, and an equally potent love for the unbroken Union of the States: a situation that left him feeling that to secede was illegal and that to prevent secession by force was equally illegal. The cabinet members on whom he most relied were Cobb and Thompson, and both men came from states that obviously were about to leave the Union. The cabinet could not possibly agree on anything of importance, and Buchanan was a man who could not act without the counsel of his cabinet; and now he was facing a problem without precedent in American history, the general of the armies was calling for action that would undoubtedly precipitate a crisis, and it was also time to compose the annual message to Congress—a lame-duck Congress, chosen two years earlier, when no one supposed that either the executive or the legislative branch would have to deal with a general disruption of the government.