Coming Fury, Volume 1

by Bruce Catton

  2: Memorandum from Mr. Seward

  William Howard Russell, correspondent for the London Times, found Abraham Lincoln a more impressive figure than he had anticipated. He was long, craggy, strong, and awkward, as everyone said he was, but to study his “strange, quaint face and head, covered with its thatch of wild republican hair” was to get an impression of kindness and good sense, and although “the mouth was made to enjoy a joke,” there was plenty of firmness in it. Russell liked it when Lincoln told him that the Times was one of the greatest powers in the world, and he also liked the President’s whimsical addition—“in fact, I don’t know anything which has much more power, except perhaps the Mississippi River.” Greeting a convocation of diplomats at the White House, Lincoln apparently had to restrain an impulse to shake hands with everybody; smiling good-naturedly, he bowed instead, and his bow was ungainly, jerky, “a prodigiously violent demonstration,” as Russell felt, which “had almost the effect of a smack in its rapidity and abruptness.” All in all, Russell felt that by the standards of European society, Lincoln was hardly a gentleman, but no one who saw him could fail to take a second look at him.

  After paying a more or less formal call at the White House, Russell was invited to a state dinner, held on the evening of March 28—the first affair of the kind for the new administration. The Englishman scanned the cabinet members with frank curiosity. Secretary Chase, clearly, was distinguished and intelligent, a man of power and energy; Cameron seemed able and adroit, with deep-set eyes over a thin mouth; Welles did not look like much, although Russell was assured that he was a man of ability even though he hardly knew one end of a ship from the other; and Blair was a hard, lean Scotchman, with a head that might be “an anvil for ideas to be hammered on.” Russell admitted he was agreeably disappointed in Mrs. Lincoln. She was pleasant, nicely gowned, and carried herself with dignity, and altogether seemed to be much more of a person than unkind secessionist ladies in Washington were saying she was. Russell noted that General Scott had come to the dinner but did not stay, having been compelled by some indisposition to retire.1

  Scott’s retirement was perhaps advisable. He had just given Lincoln a memorandum that was about to raise a storm; it was so disturbing that when the party at last ended, Lincoln asked the cabinet members to remain and listen to it. As he read it, Lincoln seemed agitated, as well he might. Having previously urged that Fort Sumter be abandoned, Scott now was advising the same thing in respect to Fort Pickens, and was basing his advice, not on military considerations, but on straight political grounds.

  It seemed doubtful, the general had written, “whether the voluntary evacuation of Fort Sumter alone would have a decisive effect upon the States now wavering between adherence to the Union and secession. It is known, indeed, that it would be charged to necessity, and the holding of Fort Pickens would be adduced in support of that view. Our Southern friends, however, are clear that the evacuation of both the forts would instantly soothe and give confidence to the eight remaining slaveholding states, and render their cordial adherence to the Union perpetual. The holding of Forts Jefferson and Taylor, on the ocean keys, depends on entirely different principles, and should never be abandoned; and, indeed, the giving up of Forts Sumter and Pickens may be best justified by the hope that we should thereby recover the State to which they geographically belong by the liberality of the act, besides retaining the eight doubtful states.”

  Seward had assured Russell a few days earlier that “we will give up nothing we have” and had insisted that the line laid down in the inaugural (to hold, occupy, and possess) clearly expressed administration policy. Now the general of the armies was saying that this policy must be abandoned, and when the President finished reading the memorandum, there was a brief, stunned silence. Less than a fortnight earlier the cabinet had agreed, almost to a man, that Fort Sumter ought to be abandoned, but in the days since then the urge to “sooth and give confidence” to the slave states that remained in the Union had grown perceptibly weaker. Blair spoke up angrily to say that General Scott was far out of line; he was “playing the part of a politician, not a general,” and as far as Blair could see, there was no military reason to give up Fort Pickens. The meeting ended at last, with the understanding that the cabinet would reassemble the next day and that each member once more would submit in writing his ideas concerning what ought to be done.2

  By noon of March 29, when the cabinet came together, it was evident that there had been a change of heart. General Scott’s surprising pronunciamento about Fort Pickens seemed to have thrown the whole business into sharper relief. Secretary Chase, who had wavered uncertainly at the first meeting, had been purged of his doubts. If war would come from an attempt to provision Fort Sumter, he wrote, it would come just as certainly from an attempt to keep Fort Pickens. He himself was definitely in favor of retaining Fort Pickens; by now he was “just as clearly in favor of provisioning Fort Sumter.” If the attempt to send rations to Major Anderson should be resisted by military force, Anderson should be reinforced: “If war is to be the result I perceive no reason why it may not be best begun in consequence of military resistance to the efforts of the administration to sustain troops of the Union stationed under the authority of the government in a fort of the Union in the ordinary course of service.”

  Chase spoke for most of his colleagues. Attorney General Bates hedged slightly; he would reinforce Fort Pickens, but as to Sumter, his best judgment was that “the time is come either to evacuate or relieve it.” Caleb Smith still remained where he had been at the first cabinet meeting—he wanted the government to pull out of Fort Sumter—and in this he did no more than reflect the attitude of his politician guardian, Secretary Seward. For Seward, despite the firm words he had uttered to correspondent Russell, wanted Major Anderson withdrawn.

  Seward was fully prepared to have the Federal government take a stand that would mean war, but he believed that Fort Pickens rather than Fort Sumter was the place where the stand ought to be taken. He felt (as he wrote the President) that the notion of coming to Major Anderson’s relief by force of arms was simply impractical and hence ought not to be tried. “The dispatch of an expedition to supply or re-enforce Sumter,” he asserted, “would provoke an attack and so involve a war at that point. The fact of preparation for such an expedition would inevitably transpire, and would therefore precipitate the war—and probably defeat the object. I do not think it wise to provoke a civil war beginning at Charleston and in rescue of an untenable position.” Fort Pickens, however, was a different case: “I would at once and at every cost prepare for a war at Pensacola … to be taken however only as a consequence of maintaining the possession and authority of the United States.”3

  The ordinary human eye could not quite follow all that Secretary Seward was doing in the weeks immediately following Lincoln’s inauguration, and his course in connection with the Sumter-Pickens business was downright subterranean. During the winter Seward had become, in the Senate, the Republican party’s semiofficial voice of moderation, the conciliator who thought a peace by compromise and adjustment possible to attain. More recently he had been playing the same part with a more official touch, playing it as if he could make as well as enunciate administration policy. If he was now drawing a sharp distinction between a war begun at Charleston and a war begun at Pensacola, he was speaking partly from principle, partly in support of promises already made (by grapevine) to Jefferson Davis’s representatives, and partly as a bid to lodge the effective final authority of the new administration in the hands of the Secretary of State—Seward’s hands.

  Two days before this momentous cabinet meeting, Seward had talked in confidence with the sympathetic Charles Francis Adams, whom he was naming (with the President’s approval) United States Minister to Great Britain. Adams noted in his diary that Seward “spoke of the President kindly and as gradually coming right,” but this qualified approval was followed by words of sharp criticism. The President, said Seward, had “no system, no relativ
e ideas, no conception of his situation,” and showed “little application to great ideas”—all of which made things most difficult for his Secretary of State. Not long after this meeting, Adams wrote gloomily that the country seemed to be drifting into war, and he certainly reflected Seward’s feeling if he did not actually echo it when he added: “I see nothing but incompetency in the head. The man is not equal to the hour.”4

  Observing the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, Mr. Yancey, of Alabama, had discerned a happy meeting of the man and the hour. Observing the first three weeks of Lincoln’s administration, Mr. Adams, of Massachusetts, had been able to see nothing of the kind. The incompetency that he did see might perhaps be remedied if Secretary Seward acted fast and with firmness, and this much Seward was quite eager to do. Seward used two instruments: a memorandum for the President, written out in his own hand and saying astounding things with an air of superior detachment; and a competent, hardworking captain in the army’s Corps of Engineers, Montgomery Meigs, who had ideas about Fort Pickens along with a refreshing readiness to behave irregularly in irregular times like the present.

  Seward got to work with Meigs first. He began on March 29, not long after the new orientation of the cabinet had been manifest, taking him to the White House and introducing him to President Lincoln; the purpose of the meeting apparently being little more than to register Captain Meigs on the mind of the President as a loyal soldier who knew what to do about this Florida fort. (Meigs told the President that Fort Pickens most certainly could be held, provided the navy had not already given it away.) After the brief meeting at the White House Seward explained the situation to Meigs.

  All men of sense, the Secretary said, knew that a war must come. He wanted to see “the burden of it”—by which, apparently, he meant the onus of starting it—fall upon those who by rebellion had provoked it. He had always wanted the troops withdrawn from Fort Sumter, which he considered too close to Washington. He wanted to have the real showdown at Fort Pickens, and possibly along the Texas coast as well, where Sam Houston might conceivably restore Texas to her duty if properly supported by United States troops. (On the latter point, Seward was indulging in one of the vainest of all the vain hopes of the 1860s.) But whatever happened elsewhere, Fort Pickens was to be held, and Captain Meigs was to develop his plans in that connection.5

  March 31 was a Sunday, and Captain Meigs was getting ready to go to church when Colonel Erasmus Keyes, military secretary to General Scott, interrupted him and took him off to see Secretary Seward, who had precise orders: Col. Keyes and Captain Meigs were to commit to paper a suitable plan for relieving and holding Fort Pickens and were to take it to the White House and submit it to the President by four o’clock that afternoon. Keyes and Meigs went over to the War Department, compared notes, found that their views on Fort Pickens were in harmony, and by half-past two had their plan drafted. It did not seem likely that they could get the paper to General Scott, win his approval, and then get to the White House by four o’clock, so they left Scott out of it and went directly to see the President. Lincoln listened to their plan, approved it, and told them to take it to General Scott and tell him this was something the President wanted imperatively: “I depend on you gentlemen,” said Lincoln, “to push this thing through.” Off to see Scott went the two officers. Scott made no objection to anything; Secretary Seward came in, and as Meigs remembered it, “the matter was talked over and resolved upon.”6

  Resolved upon, be it noted, by the Secretary of State. Simon Cameron, the Secretary of War, who held actual authority over Scott, Keyes, Meigs, and the troops that were to be dispatched, had been bypassed. It was Seward who was selecting officers, taking them to the White House, visiting the general-in-chief and expediting matters generally. President Lincoln had made up his mind to reinforce Fort Pickens, but it was Seward who was translating the decision into action. The plan itself was simple enough. A transport would land soldiers and stores at Fort Pickens, on the seaward side; at the same time a warship, cleared for action, would steam in through the harbor entrance and keep the Confederates from interfering. Nothing was being done through channels. (Seward had even picked the naval officer to command the warship, bustling Lieutenant David Dixon Porter, without saying anything to Secretary Welles about it, and was drafting orders for the President to sign in that connection.) The incompetency in administration which had so grieved Mr. Adams would at least be given a different guise by the intense dynamism of the Secretary of State.

  There was always a chance, of course, that Lincoln himself would fail to realize where the authority was being exercised, and Seward had written a memorandum to give the President guidance. This document, headed “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration,” landed on Lincoln’s desk on April 1. The President had, on that day, other matters demanding his consideration; years later the editor of his papers found twenty-four documents for April 1, referring to appointments or to the planned expeditions. Now there was this one: as completely fantastic a note as any American President ever received from his Secretary of State.

  Seward began by baldly remarking: “We are at the end of a month’s administration, and yet without a policy, either domestic or foreign.” This, to be sure, he conceded, was unavoidable, but now was the time for action; “further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the Administration but danger upon the country.”

  For domestic policy, Seward went on, the big thing was to “change the question before the public from one upon slavery, or about slavery, for a question upon union or disunion. In other words, from what would be regarded as a party question to one of Patriotism or Union.” Fort Sumter had somehow got itself identified with the slavery issue as a matter of party politics; forget about it, therefore, concentrate heavily on retention of the Gulf Coast forts, recall all warships from foreign stations to be prepared for a blockade, and thus “raise distinctly the question of Union or Disunion.”

  Foreign policy should be vigorous. France and England had been pressing Mexico for payment of certain debts, and Spain had been meddling with affairs in Santo Domingo; explanations should be demanded at once, agents should be sent through Canada, Mexico, and Central America to arouse a “continental spirit of independence against European intervention,” and if the governments from which explanations were demanded returned unsatisfactory answers, war should be declared. Then, clipping his argument off into terse paragraphs, Secretary Seward got down to bed rock:

  “But whatever policy we adopt, there must be energetic prosecution of it.

  “For this purpose it must be somebody’s business to pursue and direct it incessantly.

  “Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it, or

  “Devolve it on some member of his Cabinet. Once adopted, debates on it must end and all agree and abide.

  “It is not in my especial province.

  “But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.”7

  As President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln received his full share of odd letters, all of them demanding something and demanding it with especial fervor because the times were so perilous. Until this first day of April, the oddest of his letters was possibly one that came to him from a certain Amalia Majocchi Valtellina, an opera singer who found herself at a dead end in Rahway, New Jersey, and who demanded that the President assume the mortgage on her villa there so that she could go back to Italy and resume her career. “The orrible future of our situation, fright me,” she had written. “I have tryd to find some persons in Rahway, to hold the mortgag; but hunapply, in the hard time, is impracticable. The thought com to me, to lay our circumstances, to your Excellence … I confess my temerity, but our situation is orrible and frightful, that make me daring, hoping in your Noble heart a favorable answer.”8

  Thus Signora Valtellina, whose plea went unanswered. Now there was Secretary Seward, who felt, as did the singer, that the
situation was “orrible and frightful” and who knew just what the President ought to do about it—and who offered a suggestion that was quite as fantastic on its own level as the one she had offered. Secretary Seward had to be answered. It was a busy day at the White House, but Lincoln lost no time in writing a reply.

  As far as he could see, he wrote, the administration had a perfectly clear and definite policy—the one set forth in the inaugural about the determination to hold, occupy, and possess government property in areas where people believed they had seceded: the determination, in other words, to maintain an unbroken Union. At the time this policy was enunciated, it had had Seward’s express approval, and it had governed the administration’s actions ever since. Furthermore, it was hard for the President to understand 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.” As to foreign policy, the demanding of explanations, the making of war, and so on: “I remark that if this is to be done, I must do it.” Then Lincoln summed it all up in words that even an infatuated power seeker was bound to understand:

  “When a general line of policy is adopted, I apprehend there is no danger of its being changed without good reason, or continuing to be the subject of unnecessary debate; still, upon points arising in its progress, I wish, and I suppose I am entitled to have the advice of all the cabinet.”9

  It is not entirely clear whether Lincoln gave Seward the letter to read or simply let him have the gist of it verbally, but in either case he made his point: Lincoln would run the administration and he would also run the cabinet; policy was what he said it was, and the execution of it lay in his own hands. It would take the Secretary a few days to assimilate this, but he would do it eventually and no soreness would remain; in the end there would be more of human warmth and liking between Lincoln and Seward than between Lincoln and any other member of the cabinet. Once put firmly in his place, Seward would fill that place loyally and with much of the competency that Mr. Adams prized so highly.