by Bruce Catton
Some time later Governor Hicks reviewed the whole business in a speech before the United States Senate, to which he was elected in the middle of the war. The act of suspension, he said, was necessary. “I believe that arrests and arrests alone saved the State of Maryland not only from greater degradation than she suffered, but from everlasting destruction,” he said. “I approved them then, and I approve them now; and the only thing for which I condemn the Administration in regard to that matter is that they let some of these men out.”11
The drastic quality of Lincoln’s policy needed to be realized. Democratic governments, both before and since, have died of less. Lincoln had been ready to disband a popular legislature by force of arms, refraining not so much because it was wrong as because it did not seem to be expedient. He had suspended, in one troubled area, all of the hard-won protections which law erects between the helpless citizen and the government—courts, trial by jury, the intricate due-process safeguards against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. He had flatly defied the Supreme Court, using the army to nullify the court’s pronouncements. Years earlier he had written that it is the quality of revolutions to break up the old lines and the old laws and to make new ones. Now he was showing how this worked.
Some of his enemies could see the necessity for this sort of action and wanted his principal rival to copy it. The editor of the Richmond Examiner, reflecting on the tasks that lay ahead of the Confederate government, wrote a paragraph that Lincoln might have adopted as an argument in his own justification.
“No power in executive hands can be too great, no discretion too absolute, at such moments as these,” said an editorial in the Examiner on May 8. “We need a dictator. Let lawyers talk when the world has time to hear them. Now let the sword do its work. Usurpations of power by the chief, for the preservation of the people from robbers and murderers, will be reckoned as genius and patriotism by all sensible men in the world now and by every historian that will judge the deed hereafter.”12
Whatever might be said, either by sensible contemporaries or by latter-day historians, the thing worked in Maryland, and the chief reason why it worked may have been that Maryland did after all contain a pro-Union majority. What was done—by President Lincoln, by Governor Hicks, even by the ineffable General Butler—was effective because in the long run it somehow corresponded with what most of the people dimly wanted. Ruthlessness, then, is acceptable as long as it is ultimately acceptable to the majority … the shakiest of moral principles, but the one on which a great war began.
3: Diplomacy Along the Border
Visiting the capital of the Confederacy a little more than a fortnight after the fall of Fort Sumter, Mr. Russell, of the London Times, sensed that he was looking at a people who might make a fabulous war. He disliked much that he saw, to be sure. He found Montgomery sultry and primitive, as dull and lifeless as a town in the middle of Russia, and the universal chewing of tobacco appalled him almost as much as the slave pens and the callous crowds at the slave auctions; yet the men who lived amid all of this were prodigious. They were tall, lean, and uncouth, but “they are not peasants,” and indeed Russell believed that a real peasant or even an authentic dull-eyed rustic, in the European understanding of the word, was nowhere to be found. The poorest men dressed and acted like the wealthiest, even though dress and manner might be a poor imitation, and both rich and poor expressed anger at the insulting tyranny that was being attempted by the government at Washington.
Significantly, everyone seemed to feel that this government represented a malignant fraction rather than the Northern people as a whole. (The South had its delusions as well as the North this spring.) Men spoke of the Federal authorities as “Lincolnites,” “Black Republicans,” “Abolitionists,” and so on, as if usurpers held power in Washington, destroying national unity even before secession took place. The Confederate Congress Russell found as impressive as the people themselves. Its capitol was “one of the true Athenian Yankee-ized structures of this novo-classic land,” and its members somehow looked like old-time Covenanters, massive, earnest men inspired by a strong faith; altogether, “they were like the men who first conceived the great rebellion which led to the independence of this wonderful country—so earnest, so grave, so sober and so vindictive.” In this, Russell agreed with Varina Davis, who was writing to a friend that the men in this Congress “are the finest looking set of men I have ever seen collected together—grave, quiet and thoughtful looking men with an air of refinement.” Mrs. Davis felt that they offered a refreshing contrast to the Northerners who sat in Congress at Washington.
Congress impressed Russell more than the President did. He found Mr. Davis slight, erect, clearly a gentleman, wearing “a rustic suit of slate-colored stuff” with a black silk handkerchief at his neck; a man with a reserved, rather severe manner, with a square jaw, high cheekbones, and thin, flexible lips, one of the deep-set eyes nearly covered with a film—the man suffered from excruciating attacks of neuralgia, and had lost the sight of this eye. Davis seemed confident and he spoke with decision, but Russell thought he looked haggard and worn. Here again he agreed with Mrs. Davis, who felt that the President was working altogether too hard and said that he protested against the time he lost at meals; “he overworks himself and all the rest of mankind.”1
There was reason for overwork, for much had to be done. The great surge of Southern enthusiasm for the war was unchecked by any realization of what actual war was going to mean, and although Davis and the professional soldiers knew very well that the new troops needed much more training and equipment than it was yet possible to give them, the public at large was impatient for action. In Richmond, Lee was trying desperately to get such fundamental necessities as gun carriages, ammunition, and the machinery to make cartridges and percussion caps. People were urging him to invade the North, although he knew this to be impossible in view of “the want of instruction of the men and the inexperience of officers,” and one patriot complained to Secretary of War Walker that Lee “wishes to repress the enthusiasm of our people,” and asked: “Is our cause not in danger of demoralization?”2
It seemed to the authorities that the cause might be in danger of worse than that. When Lincoln issued his call for troops, he gave the Southern “combinations” twenty days to lay down their arms and go home. The twenty days expired on May 5; would not the Federals immediately invade Virginia, once that date was passed? Technically, to be sure, Virginia was not quite out of the Union. Her ordinance of secession would not be effective until the voters ratified it at a special election called for May 23. But Virginia and the Confederacy had already signed “a convention of alliance,” under which Confederate troops were sent to Virginia and put under Lee’s command, Lee in turn getting his orders from Montgomery, and there was not the slightest doubt that the act of secession would be upheld by a sweeping majority. There were many Confederate soldiers in the state, but they were not ready for a real fight.
Alexandria, the historic town which lay almost across the river from Washington—the obvious target for the first Federal thrust-offered a case in point. The Confederate commander there was Lieutenant Colonel A. S. Taylor, of the Virginia Volunteers, and his orders were to hold Alexandria “unless pressed by overwhelming and irresistible numbers”; but on May 5 Colonel Taylor got his men out of there without waiting to be pressed. He explained that his command consisted of 481 untrained men, many of them unarmed, none of them possessing more than a few rounds of ammunition. Living in Alexandria, they “were becoming almost useless from home influences”; they were scattered all over town, and to assemble them in any one place with any speed at all was entirely out of the question. So Colonel Taylor ordered a retreat, and it was mortally hard to blame him very much—except for the fact that the Federals were no more ready to invade than he was to defend. Alexandria went unoccupied for some days, and then the Confederates got some better-prepared troops back into the place.3
Meanwhile, the Congress at Montgomery could
at least make the war official. On May 6 Davis announced that he had approved and signed “an act recognizing the existence of war between the United States and the Confederate States,” this act having been adopted by Congress three days earlier. It merited examination. Neither in tone nor in content was it a declaration of independence. Independence was taken for granted; this was a declaration of war, pure and simple, the kind of document one full-fledged nation might issue against another, and its “whereas” clauses were devised to justify war and not revolution. It recited the acts that amounted to war: all of the Confederate government’s attempts to establish friendly relations with the United States, and to settle points at issue “upon principles of right, justice, equity and good faith” had been rebuffed; the government at Washington refused to talk about these things, refused even to listen, and was now mustering troops “to overawe, oppress and finally subjugate” the Southern people. The government at Montgomery was telling the world that it was engaging in war with a foreign power, not in insurrection.4
In Washington the line was drawn with equal sharpness: the United States was fighting to suppress a rebellion, and the only issue was this challenge to its national unity. On the same day Davis made his announcement, Secretary Seward released for publication the text of instructions which he had given to William L. Dayton, the United States Minister to France, and what he had to say collided head-on with what had been said at Montgomery.
“You cannot be too decided or too explicit,” Seward had written, “in making known to the French government that there is not now, nor has there been, nor will there be any—the least—idea existing in this Government of suffering a dissolution of this Union to take place in any way whatever. There will be here only one nation and one government, and there will be the same republic and the same Constitutional Union that have already survived a dozen national changes and changes of government in almost every other country. These will stand hereafter, as they are now, objects of human wonder and human affection.”5
The quality of human wonder and affection was, in the North, a reality that Lincoln could feel and rely on, but along the tormented border it had worn very thin and now it was shredding away entirely. Whatever of wisdom or of folly there had been in Lincoln’s call for troops, the call had driven the process of political fission to a conclusion. It had abruptly ended the time in which men of divided sympathies could wait and hope for the best; it had brought about a second secession, far more significant than the first, giving the Confederacy a strength and a broad emotional base which the cotton states alone could never have had.
For the thesis of the government at Montgomery now had as much deadly vitality as the thesis of the government at Washington. This struggle would be two things at once, in desperate earnest—insurrection and foreign war. The aims of the opposing governments could never be harmonized. If men held to the opinions they were adopting now, the thing would have to be fought to a finish. The lean and tenacious muscularity that had so impressed Mr. Russell on his travels meant that the finish was very far away.
Virginia had gone out of the Union with considered speed, a gun in each hand. Maryland had been kept in place only by careful handling and the use of force. Kentucky and Missouri were lurching unsteadily, might do anything, stood at the moment in perilous equilibrium, unpredictably explosive. North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas peeled off without delay and went with the Confederacy, giving it eleven states in place of its original seven; giving it, also, a very substantial portion of the continental mass of the original nation.
These three states that seceded so defiantly once the shooting started had refused to secede earlier in the year, and men like Lincoln and Seward had misinterpreted the refusal, believing that it reflected a firm and enduring loyalty to the Union. Actually, this loyalty had been all festooned with qualifying clauses. If the Federal government showed endless patience in negotiation, if it gave ground on every major point at issue, if in short it accepted the essential rightness of the secessionist position and behaved accordingly, then this Unionist sentiment would hold firm, and on this highly conditional loyalty a highly conditional Union might be reconstructed. The call for troops left the ordinary Southern Unionist high and dry.
In North Carolina a pro-Union majority which had existed during the winter evaporated overnight. One of the Unionist leaders in the state complained bitterly: “Lincoln prostrated us. He could have devised no scheme more effectual than the one he has pursued to overthrow the friends of the Union here.… Lincoln has made us a unit to resist until we repel our invaders or die.” On April 15 state troops seized Fort Macon, on the outer banks, and the next day the Wilmington Light Infantry occupied Fort Caswell and Fort Johnston at the entrance to the Cape Fear River—the same two forts that had been seized by an inspired citizenry, and returned to the Federal government with stiff apologies, early in the year. Governor Ellis called the legislature into special session, and the legislature immediately authorized him to give military help to Virginia. Then it summoned a secession convention to meet on May 20. If technicalities mattered, North Carolina would not join the Confederacy until May 21, but technicalities did not matter. To all intents and purposes the state was out of the Union as soon as the call for troops was issued. As a practical matter, once Virginia left the Union, North Carolina was bound to go.6
The story was very much the same in Tennessee. Two months earlier the state had shown a strong majority against secession, and even Governor Harris, as dedicated to Southern rights as Governor Letcher himself, had thought that the cause was lost. The events of April 15, however, gave the cause a vigorous rebirth. Governor Harris defied Lincoln and convened the legislature, and the legislature authorized him to make an alliance with the Confederacy, declared Tennessee’s independence, and then voted to submit the question of entering the Confederacy to a popular vote. This election would occur on June 8, but by the end of the first week in May it was obvious that Tennessee had left the Union.
Tennessee’s case, as a matter of fact, was rather special. Slavery here was not quite like slavery in the deep South. In the mountainous eastern section it hardly existed at all, and even in the more populous west it had been subtly modified. Completely and unmistakably Southern, Tennessee nevertheless looked in some ways like a Northern state that had unaccountably acquired the habit of slavery; or, just conceivably, it represented an evolutionary stage in the development of slave society which no other Southern state had yet reached. Western Tennessee had big plantations in the traditional style, and it had poor whites and shiftless tenant farmers, also after the old tradition, yet its population was not really divided into two sharply contrasting classes, the rich planters and the poor whites; its distinguishing characteristic was the presence of a strong, growing middle class, which owned few slaves, operated family-sized farms with success, developed small but healthy industrial plants in towns and cities, and all in all prospered happily despite the presence of slavery.
This was the state that had contributed John Bell, the Constitutional Union candidate, to the last presidential campaign. Like Bell, its majority wanted the Union to live but identified itself with the South when the final pinch came. Bell and others had signed an appeal in mid-April pleading for peace and a reunited country, but events were too much for them. Before the month was out, Bell was making a speech at Nashville declaring that he would stand by the South and would defend it against “the unnecessary, aggressive, cruel, unjust and wanton war” which Washington was preparing. He had spoken for compromise, and there had been no compromise; now he was accepting war because there did not seem to be anything else that he could do, but he was doing it sadly, and the war cruelly broke him. In the deep depression of spirit with which he met the onset of hostilities, Bell differed from the Tennessee majority.7 Like Virginia, this state, which had refused to secede in the absence of an overt act at Washington, went out with enthusiasm when the time to go out at last came, responding to an emotional tie that was fa
r more compelling than a mere abstract reverence for the Union. There was a strange significance in the fact that these two states, Virginia and Tennessee, which had tried to avert war, gave the Confederacy more soldiers and the war more battlefields than any other states.
They were alike, also, in that they suffered their own sectional divisions. Western Virginia refused to respond to the secessionist impulse, showed a Unionist sentiment that was robust enough to stand the shock, and would presently—in a wholly extra-legal way, abetted by Washington—perform its own act of secession, breaking away from Virginia and clinging to the Union as a bob-tailed but finally acceptable new state. Eastern Tennessee would not go so far, but it was strong for the Union; it held a convention, denounced governor and legislature for making the alliance with the Confederacy, and sent in a memorial asking that the eastern counties be allowed to form a new state. Eastern Tennessee would be a problem to both Presidents—to Davis because it represented a disloyal area giving aid and comfort to the enemy; to Lincoln because it kept asking for armed help which he was not able to provide.
Arkansas slipped out of the Union almost without argument. In March a state convention had rejected secession by the close vote of 39 to 35, and had called a special election for August to enable the electorate to choose between secession and “co-operation”; the whole action meaning nothing more than the fact that before Fort Sumter was bombarded a majority in Arkansas favored compromise rather than secession. The call for troops put the game in the hands of the pro-Confederates, who acted without delay. The state convention reassembled on May 6, condemned the “inhuman design” of the Lincoln administration, canceled the August election, and voted for secession by a lop-sided 69 to 1. The sole dissenter was an Ozark mountaineer named Isaac Murphy; here, as elsewhere in the South, loyalty to the Union seemed to have its only solid roots in the mountain country, where few people owned slaves and where the independent mountain men tended to be somewhat suspicious of the doings of political leaders from the lowlands. The all but unanimous vote in the convention probably overstated the extent of pro-Confederate sentiment, but this was only a matter of degree. By May 18 delegates from Arkansas were seated in the Confederate Congress; technically, Arkansas was the ninth state to join the Confederacy.8