by Bruce Catton
The governor was moving fast, but the people of Virginia were moving even faster. Some of the military units Governor Letcher was talking about had not only assembled ahead of time but were on the move to smite the Yankees by the time he got out his proclamation. Henry A. Wise had been governor of Virginia at the time of the John Brown affair—had questioned the old man after the collapse of the uprising, and had in effect caused Brown to be convicted of treason and hanged—and the Fort Sumter crisis and what followed it turned his mind immediately to Harper’s Ferry. On the evening of April 15, before Governor Letcher had even had time to make his defiant reply to Lincoln’s demand for troops, Wise arranged a conference, in Richmond, of as many militia officers as he could find, and worked out a plan to get an armed force into Harper’s Ferry to seize the government arsenal there. With this advance planning, a force of perhaps 1000 armed men was put in motion the moment the convention passed the ordinance of secession, and by the evening of April 18 this force was drawn up within four miles of the historic little town.
United States authority at the arsenal was represented by First Lieutenant Roger Jones and forty-two regular infantrymen. (By one of the remarkable coincidences common to this war, Lieutenant Jones was a cousin of Robert E. Lee.) It was utterly impossible for this company to stay there; not only were the Federals badly outnumbered, but Harper’s Ferry (as other officers were to discover, later in the war) was practically indefensible anyway. The town lay at the bottom of a cup, with high mountain ridges on every side, and unless its garrison could hold all of these ridges, which would take a very large force, an assailant could shell the place into submission without much trouble. Jones set fire to the arsenal and armory that night and put his command on the road for Pennsylvania, and the next morning the Virginia troops marched in. The government buildings had been destroyed, but the machinery with which military rifles were made was not badly damaged, and it was promptly moved farther south to make arms for the Confederacy. Several thousand rifle barrels and gun locks were salvaged, and the Virginians settled down to hold Harper’s Ferry and the country roundabout. In a short time they got a new commander—an ungainly professor from the Virginia Military Institute, a cold-eyed West Pointer who had fought in the Mexican War and who turned out to be a secretive and hard-boiled stickler for discipline; a colonel in Virginia’s service by the name of Thomas Jonathan Jackson.11
It had been just one week since Beauregard’s guns opened on Fort Sumter, and already Virginia was in the war. Either Lincoln had discounted Virginia’s action in advance, or (which seems much more probable) he had grossly overestimated the amount of Unionist sentiment in this and other border states. Neither Lincoln nor Seward had been able to see that this Union sentiment was purely conditional; it existed as long as no strain was put upon it, but when a real test came it fell apart. The emotional drive was all-important, and in this part of the country the Government of the United States, the very concept of the United States as a nation, could look like an interfering third party standing between a man and the object of his deepest loyalty.… The fury was on the land, and men all over America were responding to impulses that came up from the greatest depths.
Among them, Robert E. Lee.
Reaching his home, Arlington, at the beginning of March, Lee had reported to the War Department on March 5, immediately after the inauguration ceremonies were out of the way. He had been placed on waiting orders, which seems to have been General Scott’s way of keeping him where he would be available for immediate use in case of emergency. (Of all the officers in the army, Lee was the one Scott regarded most highly.) On March 16 Lee was made colonel of the 1st U. S. Cavalry, an appointment which he promptly accepted. Since then nothing had happened. Lee had had a waiting period of approximately seven weeks—as odd a period, one would suppose, as his entire life contained. He had been educated for service in the United States Army and he had spent all of his life in that service; now the sections of the nation had drifted into war, and as a recently promoted officer in the army, Lee might expect to be called on to lead troops against the South. His own state, Virginia, had not seceded, and in Texas Lee had said that he would do what Virginia did. He had also said that he thought perhaps he would resign and “go to planting corn.” Lee had waited at Arlington, hoping for the best.
When he first saw Scott—sometime between March 5 and the day he was given his promotion, apparently—he asked the old general what was going to happen; for his part, he said, he could not go into action against the South, and if that kind of action was coming, he wanted to know so that he could resign at once. Scott reassured him. This was at the time when Seward was talking conciliation, Lincoln’s cabinet was almost a unit in opposing reinforcements for Fort Sumter, Lincoln seemed to be in no mood to force the issue, and Scott told Lee he believed there would be a peaceful solution. Lee clung to this assurance. Even on April 15, the day Lincoln issued his call for troops, Lee retained some shred of optimism. An Alexandria clergyman whom Lee visited that evening said that Lee “was not entirely in despair.” Lee that night apparently voiced some belief that things would come out all right, for the minister wrote: “I hope his view may prove correct. But it seems to be against probabilities.”12
The probabilities caught up with Lee almost immediately. On April 18, the day Virginia’s troops were moving on Harper’s Ferry, the day after the convention had voted for secession, Lee was called into conference in Washington by Francis P. Blair, Sr., who asked him point-blank if he would take command of the United States Army. Blair made it clear that he was asking this question with the full approval of President Lincoln. Afterward, Blair wrote that Lee expressed a certain devotion to the Union and said that he could not make up his mind without first consulting General Scott; Lee himself, after the war, said that he told Blair he could take no part in any invasion of the South, and he added that he went to see Scott simply to tell him what his decision had been. In any case, he called on Scott as soon as he left Blair and told him what had happened.
The meeting with Scott was brief. Lee told Scott that he was going to resign and admitted that the struggle was hard. He did not believe in secession, he said, and if he owned every slave in the South he would free them all if that would bring peace; but to fight against Virginia was not in him. Lee went back to Arlington. Two days later he wrote a formal letter of resignation and sent it to the War Department, asking that it be made effective at once.
Those two intervening days appear to have been days of emotional upheaval rather than of intellectual analysis. To his sister, Mrs. Anne Marshall, of Baltimore, Lee wrote that the whole South “is in a state of revolution” and that Virginia had been drawn into it. He himself could see no necessity for this state of things, but his course seemed clear: “I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword.” To his brother, Captain Sydney Smith Lee, of the Navy, he wrote in much the same vein; he had thought to wait until Virginia’s voters had passed on the ordinance of secession, but the war had actually begun and he might at any moment be ordered to do things which he could not conscientiously do. Accordingly, “save in defense of my native State I have no desire ever again to draw my sword.” The same phrase about drawing his sword only in defense of his native state had appeared in his letter of resignation addressed to Simon Cameron. In a letter which she wrote to friends at about this time, Mrs. Lee said: “You can scarcely conceive the struggle it has cost Robert to resign to contend against the flag he has so long honored disapproving, as we both do, the course of the North & South, yet our fate is now linked with the latter & may the prayers of the faithful for the restoration of peace be heard.… We shall remain quietly at home as long as possible.”13
This would not be very long. Two days later a delegation s
ent by the Virginia authorities invited Lee to go to Richmond. He went at once, and on April 23 he was made commander of Virginia’s armed forces. The time of waiting was over; Lee had not so much made up his mind as followed his heart. In this he was doing what most of his fellow Americans were doing.
In Boston, George Ticknor wrote to a friend in England: “We have been slow to kindle; but we have made a Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace of it at last, and the heat will remain, and the embers will smoulder, long after the flames that now light up everything shall cease to be seen or felt.”14
CHAPTER SIX
The Way of Revolution
1: Homemade War
The Southern Confederacy had been in existence a little more than two months, and in that time it had made much progress. By the middle of April it had acquired both a fort and a state which it had not had before. Its credit was good, subscriptions of $8,000,000 having been received on a national loan that asked for $5,000,000; a new and much larger issue would be launched very shortly. The Post Office Department was about ready to go into business despite a lamentable lack of proper stamps; courts had been set up in most of the states, and there would soon be a patent office, it being evident that the Yankees had no monopoly on the inventive genius. The Confederate State Department was already in action, and long before Sumter was fired on it had sent commissioners abroad to explain secession to the powers of Europe and (it was devoutly hoped) to win recognition and treaties of friendship, commerce, and navigation.
Significantly, the principal commissioner was William L. Yancey. The prince of fire-eaters was being sent far away from the nation he had done so much to create; he was entrusted with the most delicate of diplomatic missions, not so much because anyone supposed that he had a talent for diplomacy—his enormous skill lay in the rough-and-tumble of American politics—as because he might be an embarrassment if he stayed at home. Leaders who could eat fire had served their turn. The destiny of the Confederacy now was in the hands of more moderate men who were prepared to emphasize the eternal logic and justice of Southern secession, ready to meet force with unmeasured force if need be but still abiding in the faith that reasonable men must eventually accept the Confederacy at its own valuation.
Yancey and his fellow commissioners, Pierre A. Rost, of Louisiana, and A. Dudley Mann, of Georgia, were to work especially on Great Britain. Secretary of State Toombs, himself a man of action who would soon find the dignity of his office too confining, had given detailed instructions. They were to reveal to the British statesmen the complete and undeniable legitimacy of the new Confederate nation; they were also to remind them that this nation was where most of Britain’s cotton came from, and were to hint delicately that the supply would probably be cut off in case of a long war. It was hoped, in Montgomery, that this reasonable presentation would be enough. Editor Rhett, of Charleston, was complaining that Yancey ought to have authority to bait the net properly, offering to the British nation of shopkeepers irresistible trade concessions in return for a binding offensive and defensive alliance, but the government was playing a more sober game.1
Davis’s attitude was revealed in his address to a special session of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate states, called together after the long dispute at Fort Sumter finally exploded into actual war. “All we ask is to be let alone,” he cried. The moment Lincoln showed himself ready to adopt a let-alone policy, “the sword will drop from our grasp and we shall be ready to enter into treaties of amity and commerce that can but be mutually beneficial.” For the time being, however, the sword must be held. The Confederacy had 19,000 men in the field—at Charleston and at Pensacola, in Fort Pulaski below Savannah, in Fort Morgan at Mobile, and in Forts Jackson and St. Philip at the mouth of the Mississippi—and it was sending 16,000 more to Virginia. It was preparing to organize and equip an army of 100,000 men, and as long as the United States showed a desire to subjugate the South, “we will continue to struggle for our inherent right to freedom, independence and self government.” But there could be no reasonable doubt of final success of the cause.2
Davis would have no fire-eaters setting the pace. A man of profound self-control, he would avoid the unpredictable violence of revolution; he would play this by the book. Both Presidents would, as a matter of fact, until it became impossible to play it that way any longer. One of the saddest facts about the nation’s final plunge over the brink is that even after the fighting had actually started, both Davis and Lincoln responded to some dim, deeply held feeling that perhaps the point of no return had not really been passed, that there might yet by some miracle be a bloodless solution and a healing. Long afterward the Confederate President’s wife, Varina Howell Davis, remembered how her husband took the news that Major Anderson had surrendered Fort Sumter. His first remark was that he was glad so little blood had been shed. Then, most strangely, he remarked: “Separation is not yet, of necessity, final. There has been no blood spilled more precious than that of a mule.” And Lincoln, in this same month of April, talking to a group of “frontier guards” at the White House, said an equally unexpected thing: “I have desired as sincerely as any man—I sometimes think more than any other man—that our present difficulties might be settled without the shedding of blood. I will not say that all hope is yet gone.”3
Separation not yet final, hope not yet gone … but each man had set himself a task which he would not give up, had taken a position to which he would cling with the most uncompromising tenacity. More than that: the immense emotion that was welling up from bottomless deeps in the hearts of people all over the country was stronger now than any President and would carry America beyond all formalities and restraints. The country had entered upon a revolution, even though it was not quite clear just who was making the revolution or whom the revolution was directed against, and it would at last wring from Lincoln the bitter cry (in which austere Davis might well have joined) that he could not claim to have controlled events but must admit rather that events had controlled him.
Revolution sets soldiers fighting civilians, and it can pick a city street for a battlefield. So it was now. This was civil war, a time of overthrow and destruction and rising savagery, and the first real fight came when a senseless riot went rolling across Baltimore, with men in uniform and men not in uniform stretched dead on the pavement after it had passed … and with a new forced draft applied to Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.
The border states had been considered the key pieces in the secession crisis, and in some ways Maryland was the most important of the lot. If Maryland went out of the Union (Virginia having gone already), the national capital would be wholly cut off and the government could be imprisoned by its foes, in which case the government would probably lose the war for sheer inability to function. At any cost whatever, the Lincoln administration had to keep Maryland in the Union—with a gun at the nape of the neck, if in no other way.
Cotton-state agents who came proselytizing for additions to the Confederacy in the weeks just after South Carolina seceded had a thin time of it in Maryland; the state listened politely but refused to respond. Although the Mason and Dixon line formed its northern boundary, Maryland was only half southern; it was Dixieland along the eastern shore, but it was straight Pennsylvania west of Baltimore, and Baltimore itself was partly a southern city and partly a trading center of the northern type, prospering because it was both a gateway to the Middle West and an outpost of eastern finance. In a time of civil war a state thus divided was certain to have trouble, and Maryland got its full share at a very early stage.
When Lincoln called for troops, Maryland’s Governor Thomas H. Hicks, Unionist-minded but fully aware that very careful handling was called for, hurried to Washington and got from Secretary Cameron and General Scott a promise that Maryland’s militia would be used only inside the state and in the District of Columbia. He passed this assurance on to the people of Maryland, and in a sober proclamation he warned that “the consequences of a rash step will be fearful” and urged everyo
ne to refrain from words or deeds that might “precipitate us into the gulf of discord and ruin gaping to receive us.” Maryland would furnish her quota of troops, giving the government a conditional but invaluable loyalty which might or might not last for the duration of the war.4
The trouble that Governor Hicks foresaw came almost at once. Washington needed troops, being almost totally undefended, and because Washington’s only railroad connection with the North was the railroad line that came down from Baltimore, the troops Washington got had to cross Maryland. The first contingent reached the capital on April 18, the day the Harper’s Ferry arsenal was lost; a detachment of 460 Pennsylvania volunteers, whose seeming unreadiness led John Hay to comment acidly on the “unlicked patriotism” that came in “ragged and unarmed,” and a company of regulars brought from Indian-country posts in Minnesota. These came down from Harrisburg, were alternately hooted and cheered as they went through Baltimore, and reached Washington without incident, but their passing stung the sensitivities of the numerous Southern sympathizers in and around Baltimore. This transit of troops bent on coercion of the South was an outrage, and if there was any more of it, Baltimore’s Southerners would take steps. Rumors of coming violence reached Washington, and Secretary Cameron warned Governor Hicks by telegraph that “unlawful combinations of misguided citizens” proposed to use force to keep troops from coming to Washington. This warning might have done some good, except that no one in the War Department told either Governor Hicks or Mayor George William Brown, of Baltimore, when the next contingent of troops was due to pass through Baltimore. The local authorities, who knew without being told by Cameron that something was likely to pop, thus lacked the one bit of knowledge that would enable them to take effective precautions.5