by Bruce Catton
Meanwhile, one fact was becoming obvious. The Republicans had won the last election and were in the driver’s seat. They had campaigned on the notion that there should be no extension of slavery in the territories and on that point they would not yield an inch. Their leaders were as unwilling to compromise as any cotton-state fire-eaters—with whom, indeed, they shared an extremely accurate understanding of what the election had really meant. A step had been taken which must ultimately mean the containment of slavery; unless this step were canceled, slavery could not be permanent but must eventually die. The Republican leaders would no more give up this point than men like Toombs and Davis would accept it. To win peace and a continued harmonious Union, Crittenden was in fact asking the people of the North to reconsider the verdict they had rendered at the polls. What the people themselves might have said if the proposition had finally come to them is beyond determination, but as a political proposition it was something the party leadership would not dream of embracing.
To outward appearances Lincoln, the President-elect, was doing nothing much more lofty than work on the selection of his cabinet, which was partly a matter of choosing his own administrative advisers and assistants and partly a matter of putting the new party together on an enduring basis. Privately, however, he was working against compromise. On January 28 the New York Herald reported him as saying that he would “suffer death” before accepting any compromise “which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right.” Correspondent Henry Villard wrote from Springfield that Lincoln was “firmly, squarely and immovably set against any compromise position that will involve a sacrifice of Republican principles,” and Senator Charles Sumner exultantly wrote to Governor John A. Andrew, of Massachusetts, that Lincoln “is firm as a rock” against the Crittenden proposal. Sumner wrote out the words Lincoln had given him:
“Give them personal liberty bills & they will pull in the slack, hold on, & insist on the border state compromise—give them that, they’ll again pull in the slack & demand Crit’s comp.—that pulled in, they will want all that So. Carolina asks.” To one pleader for compromise, Sumner wrote, Lincoln had said that “he would sooner go out into his back yard & hang himself”; and according to Sumner’s letter, Lincoln had ended his interview with the flat statement: “By no act or complicity of mine shall the Republican party become a ‘mere sucked egg—all shell—no principle in it.’ ” In a postscript, Summer labeled this letter “private—except for the faithful.”12
This did not mean that there could never be a compromise. Villard believed that Lincoln’s firmness rested in large part on the belief that his election must be accepted first. Chosen by a minority of all the voters, he had nevertheless been chosen in the Constitutional manner, and the reporter wrote that “he desires to see the somewhat uncertain disposition of the border slave states yield to the rights of the majority, and obedience to the Federal Constitution and laws fully decided by his inauguration, before his friends shall make any move for reconciliation upon the basis of congressional enactments or Constitutional amendments.” In informal conversations at this time, Villard said Lincoln expressed doubts about the possibility of retaining in the Union, by force, states that were determined to leave; he refused to encourage anti-slavery leaders who hoped that the whole secession crisis would somehow bring about the end of slavery, and he firmly believed that property in slaves was protected by the Constitution. Lincoln was under pressure, and he was showing it. On January 11, the Illinois politician W. H. L. Wallace wrote that “he is continually surrounded by a crowd of people,” and said that “he looks care worn & more haggard & stooped than I ever saw him.” Editor C. H. Ray, of the Chicago Tribune, a dedicated enemy of slavery, wrote that Lincoln was honest and patriotic enough for anybody, but that “more iron would do him no harm.”13
It may be that by insisting on immediate secession the leaders of the Gulf Squadron had played their high trump too soon. The threat to secede had been a powerful weapon, but when secession became a visible fact rather than a threat, the argument was moved to a level where it was very hard to carry on negotiations. On most points affecting slavery, moderate Republican leaders like Lincoln were prepared to make some adjustments, but they would make no adjustments whatever on the question of union. Slowly but steadily the men of the North were beginning to realize that they were facing a new issue. Once they fully understood this point they would show a firmness that had not been anticipated.
Signs of this new firmness were appearing. On January 11 the New York legislature passed resolutions pledging full support to the President, in men and in money, in any action he might take to enforce the laws and uphold the authority of the Federal government. The resolutions also thanked the Union-loving citizens of those slave states that had not seceded; and, with a blithe incapacity to understand how these resolves might be regarded in the South, the New York authorities sent copies to the various Southern governors. Virginia’s governor indignantly returned his copy with the curt request that no more communications of this kind be forwarded, and the Tennessee legislature asked Governor Harris to tell New York that if that state ever sent armed forces into the South, the people of Tennessee would resist “at all hazards and to the last extremity.” But if the action of the New York legislature was tactless, it was indicative of a changing attitude, as was the fact that similar resolutions were presently adopted in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Ohio. The Pennsylvania legislature chimed in with the considered opinion that “the right of the people of a single state to absolve themselves at will, and without the consent of other states, from their most solemn obligations, and hazard the liberties and happiness of the millions composing this union, cannot be acknowledged.”14
On the surface the Southern position looked weak. Of the fifteen slave states, only seven had voted to secede. The border states’ reluctance to move hinted strongly that outside of the cotton belt the institution was in fact beginning to die, and that “containment” was actually beginning to take place. Yet this very weakness served to stiffen the spines of the secessionists. Time was running out, and the whole way of life that was based on slavery and symbolized by slavery’s existence was threatened not so much by a recent Republican victory as by the inexorable passage of the years. To remain in the Union was to consent to the eventual transformation of Southern society. It was now or never, and this was the imperative that drove moderates like Davis down the trail blazed by extremists like Yancey.
Even though most of them owned no slaves and never would own any, the great mass of Southern people would follow when the final testing came. They identified themselves completely with a life and a land that seemed good to them; even more, they identified themselves with a dominant race which drew status and happiness from a rigid caste system whose dissolution, as far as they could see, would reduce their ordered existence to chaos. It was the massed presence of the mute and luckless Negro that exerted the real pressure. The average Southerner might not fight for slavery, but he would fight to the death to avert race equality. The average Northerner, in turn, even though he might share in this prejudice, would not understand the force it exerted—not until he tripped over it.
Nearly two years later, when the war that was now approaching was in full swing, a North Carolina mountaineer wrote to Governor Zebulon Vance a letter that expressed the non-slaveholder’s point of view perfectly. Believing that some able-bodied men ought to stay at home to preserve order, this man set forth his feelings: “We have but little interest in the value of slaves, but there is one matter in this connection about which we feel a very deep interest. We are opposed to Negro equality. To prevent this we are willing to spare the last man, down to the point where women and children begin to suffer for food and clothing; when these begin to suffer and die, rather than see them equalized with an inferior race we will die with them. Everything, even life itself, stands pledged to the cause; but that our greatest strength may be em
ployed to the best advantage and the struggle prolonged let us not sacrifice at once the object for which we are fighting.”15
Real compromise was all but impossible. The most profound emotional force in the South was leading men to revolt against the whole trend of the times, and a tragically isolated society was preparing to risk everything in the attempt to preserve a past that was dissolving. Even if the Republican leaders had had the will to give the South the “guarantees” which it demanded, they actually lacked the power to do it, because those guarantees were out of any man’s reach. War might come and great victories might be won, but the South was struggling for an unattainable.
Robert E. Lee was in Texas this winter, and late in January he wrote to his wife in gloomy foreboding:
“As far as I can judge from the papers we are between a state of anarchy & civil war. May God avert from us both. It has been evident for years that the country was doomed to run the full length of democracy. To what a fearful pass it has brought us. I fear mankind for years will not be sufficiently Christianized to bear the absence of restraint & force.” To his daughter, a few days later, he added the words: “If the bond of the Union can only be maintained by the sword & bayonet, instead of brotherly love & friendship, & if strife & Civil War are to take the place of mutual aid & commerce, its existence will lose all interest with me.… I can however do nothing but trust to the wisdom & patriotism of the nation & to the overruling providence of a merciful God.”16
CHAPTER FOUR
Two Presidents
1: The Man and the Hour
Montgomery seemed an unlikely place for great events. It was a pleasant, unassuming country town, built on rolling hills at the head of navigation on the Alabama River, sheer bluffs rising from the water front, open marsh and meadowland stretching away on the far side of the stream. From the top of the bluffs Main Street, wide and sandy, went inland half a mile to the highest of the modest hills, where the white columns of a Greek revival capitol building rose as a landmark; a correspondent wrote that although the building was not particularly impressive, it nevertheless dominated the city, and he felt that it “stared down the street with quite a Roman rigor.” There were shaded streets with fine residences, and a reporter for the New Orleans Delta enthusiastically reported that these showed “much architectural skill and beauty,” with lawns and gardens and shrubbery “arranged in such order as to impress the beholder that these are the bodes of wealth, taste and refinement.”1 Montgomery, in short, was eminently suited to the part it had been playing—capital of a prosperous rural state, trading and commercial center for a thriving agricultural area. Now it had a new part to play. It was to become a world capital, in which men would say and do things that would affect American history for generations to come. On February 4, delegates from six of the states that had left the Union met in Montgomery to create and staff a government for the new Confederate States of America.
Montgomery was not old. It had existed for forty years, and so it was younger than many of the statesmen who assembled in it. Its central location commended it as a site for the South’s great constitutional convention, and perhaps it was fitting that the new nation come to birth in a new country town (the cotton belt itself was new, only recently drawn from primeval wilderness, and of the seven states that would form the new Confederacy, only two had been in existence at the time of the American Revolution). But the city’s facilities were plainly inadequate. There were two principal hotels, the Montgomery and the Exchange House, both of them overcrowded and expensive, and one (by the testimony of survivors) decidedly uncomfortable, not to say dirty. The capitol building itself, although handsome, was not nearly large enough, and it would soon be necessary to take space in a commercial building, letting the President of the Confederacy hold office in a hotel parlor. (A little later this month the new Secretary of State, beset by an applicant for office, angrily took off his top hat, held it out, and demanded: “Can you get in here, sir? That’s the Department of State, sir!”) The intense eagerness to shift the capital to Richmond, a few months later, probably came at least partly from the general realization that Montgomery just was not big enough to be the capital city of a great nation.2
Its inadequacy was not, however, immediately visible, for the great convention was not actually composed of a large number of delegates. Six states were represented at the start—Texas, the process of secession still incomplete, would be along a bit later—and these six sent but thirty-eight delegates, one of whom was delayed in his arrival. The other thirty-seven chose Howell Cobb, of Georgia, as their president and got down to work with a minimum of speech-making.
There was plenty for these men to do. They had to create a new nation, provide it with a constitution, name its chief executive, and then run the machinery which they had created; by turns they must be revolutionary committee, constitutional convention, electoral college, and national congress, all of these functions overlapping slightly, the specific legal authority for some of them being vague. This work had to be done under powerful pressures. There was first of all the pressure of time; it seemed essential to have the new government in operation, as a visibly going concern, by March 4, when the old government at Washington would install a new and presumably hostile President. It seemed advisable, also, to move fast in order to check the South Carolina hotheads, who were quite likely to provoke a fight with Major Anderson at Fort Sumter and thus bring on a war while the Confederacy was still in the act of getting born. There was pressure, too, from public opinion in the outer world. It must be shown that what was done at Montgomery was done by sober and conservative men who would make no disturbance unless malevolent outsiders thrust a cause of action upon them. The border states must not be frightened off. It must be proved, both to the satisfaction of the delegates themselves and to the skeptical eyes of the strangers up North, that secession was wholly legal, that this new nation was of entire and unstained legitimacy, and in short that this revolution was really no revolution but was simply the quiet assertion of undeniable rights by men who had suffered much with great forbearance.
All in all, it was a very large assignment, and it was discharged with speed and competence. The delegates met on February 4, got down to serious work on the following day, adopted a provisional constitution on February 8, named a provisional President on February 9, and had a government on the job and functioning within a week thereafter. Few American deliberative bodies have done so much so fast and so smoothly, with less time out for oratory.
Exactly how it was all done is not yet wholly clear, for this convention-congress voted at the start to conduct its more important deliberations in secret. When the convention became the Congress the habit was continued, and throughout the life of the Southern Confederacy the legislative branch did much of its work in executive session. In the long run this was undoubtedly a handicap; the open debate, the constant public examination of governmental policies and actions, out of which comes an informed public opinion, was very largely lacking, and the new government deprived itself of full grass-roots intimacy and understanding with the people back home—a deprivation that would finally be extremely costly. For the moment, however, there was no one to complain, except the reporters who were locked out, and also certain indignant ladies who had accompanied their husbands to Montgomery and now found that they could not sit in the galleries to watch, to listen, to applaud prettily, and to be admired. Alexander Stephens wrote long afterward that this was the ablest group of its kind he had ever seen, and he felt that the delegates “were not such men as revolutions or civil commotions usually bring to the surface. They were men of substance as well as of solid character—men of education, of reading, of refinement, and well versed in the principles of government.… Their object was not to tear down so much as it was to build up with the greater security and permanency. The debates were usually characterized by brevity, point, clearness and force.”3
Whatever was said in debate, the fire-eaters said very little of it.
Never was a revolution made by men less revolutionary in manner; the new nation was presented as if its birth had been the mildest and most natural of events, and there was a good deal of sentiment to name it The Republic of Washington—opposed, indeed, by some who argued that the name should simply be the United States of America, as proof that it was the Northern states that had really fractured the old Constitution and destroyed the old Union. One member, recalling that the convention was at all times “quiet, orderly, dignified, with a deep sense of responsibility,” wrote that “there was a marked and purposed agreement with the Constitution of the United States.” This, he said, was an attempt to vindicate “the oft-repeated declaration that the States withdrew, not from the Constitution, but from the wicked and injurious perversions of the compact.”4