The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  The change of locale failed to dilute the passions and positions of the fire-eaters. Yet word that the Republican Party had nominated Lincoln gave moderate and extreme Democrats alike a common enemy against whom to vent their rage. After convening at Baltimore on June 18, they nominated Douglas on the second ballot and soon tapped Herschel Johnson of Georgia as his running mate. That outpouring of Democratic Party unity, however, swiftly collapsed. The following day Breckinridge’s supporters met in a separate hall and unanimously declared him the Democratic Party’s candidate, then nominated Joseph Lane of Oregon as his running mate.

  This four-man race broke down into two parallel contests, Lincoln versus Douglas in the North and Breckinridge versus Bell in the South. The November 6 election results reflected the nation’s political fragmentation. Lincoln won a plurality with 1,866,452 votes, or 35.4 percent of the total, over Douglas with 1,376,957, Breckinridge with 849,781, Bell with 588,849, and the Fusion Party, which lacked a nominee, with 595,846. Of course, the American people do not elect presidents, special electors do based on who wins which states. The results put Lincoln over the top with 180 electors—107 northern, 73 western, and none from the South—compared to 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell, and 12 for Douglas. The victory was lopsided regionally as well, with nearly all of Lincoln’s votes coming from northern states while he carried only 2 of 996 southern counties.15

  A national crisis immediately followed the election.16 On November 10 South Carolina’s legislature voted unanimously to hold a state convention on December 6 to consider secession. Within a month every state across the Lower South scheduled its own convention.

  The lame-duck president did nothing to stem that tide. In the annual address that he sent to Congress on December 3, Buchanan admitted that secession was unconstitutional but blamed the nation’s breakup on “the long continued and intemperate interference of the northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States.” Other than that he fatalistically accepted secession and offered no suggestions for how to entice the rebel states back into the Union. Indeed, he declared that “I am the last president of the United States.”17

  Most Congressional leaders acted more responsibly. Each chamber set up committees to debate and propose compromises that might resolve the crisis. The House’s Committee of Thirty-Three, with each state represented, eventually hammered out bills to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and protect slave states from any federal government interference. The Senate Committee of Thirteen was chaired by John Crittenden, a Kentucky Unionist and slave master, and included William Seward of New York. Crittenden and Seward searched for a deal in a series of meetings with political leaders from both houses. The result was called the Crittenden proposals: the federal government would continue not to interfere in any state’s practice of slavery; the Missouri Compromise line, which allowed slavery south of 36°30´ north latitude from western Missouri to the Rocky Mountain watershed, would be revived and extended to the Pacific Ocean; slavery would remain legal in the District of Columbia unless Virginia and Maryland agreed to its abolition; and masters would be compensated for any slaves that escaped north and could not be recovered.18 In both houses, leaders talked about but never formally submitted a Thirteenth Amendment that forbade the federal government from interfering with any state’s practice of slavery.

  All along, moderate politicians and newspaper editors tried to dilute southern zealotry and paranoia with reason. They explained that the election had changed nothing of substance. While President-Elect Lincoln and Congress’s pending Republican majority opposed slavery’s extension, they had foresworn challenging slavery where it existed or the constitutional right of masters to recapture their escaped slaves wherever they ran.

  Not just southerners condemned and feared Lincoln. Exacerbating northern dread over the secession crisis was uncertainty over the man who had been elected president. Charles Francis Adams, whose father and grandfather had been president, expressed that deep concern: “I must . . . affirm, without hesitation, that in the history of our government down to this hour, no experiment so rash has ever been made as that of elevating to the head of affairs a man with so little previous experience for his task as Mr. Lincoln.”19

  In the end, all the compromise efforts in Congress came to naught. Most men in the Lower South’s states were hell-bent to secede and no appeals to reason could stop their lemming-like rush. South Carolina declared its independence on December 20, followed by Mississippi on January 9, Florida on January 10, Alabama on January 11, Georgia on January 19, Louisiana on January 26, and Texas on February 2. The secession of Texas came too late for its delegates to join a convention of the other six states that met at Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4. Over the next week, the delegates wrote a constitution, elected Jefferson Davis the president of the Confederate States of America on February 9, and sent envoys to the other slave states to urge them to secede and join them. Davis was inaugurated as president on February 28. His first decisive act came on March 6, when he called for one hundred thousand volunteers to join the Confederate army.

  Slavery was the cause for which the southerners had seceded and would war if need be. Mississippi’s declaration of the “Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession” was typical: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. . . . There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union. . . . It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. . . . We must either submit to degradation . . . or we must secede from the Union.” The Texans expressed more graphically the racist ideology that shaped every dimension of their lives and justified their rebellion: “We hold a as undeniable truths that . . . all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race . . . is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator.”20 Slavocrats saw their region as a separate nation. On the war’s eve, Jefferson Davis expressed the outlook of most southerners when he denounced as “political heresy” the idea that “ours is a union of the people, the formation of a nation, and a supreme government charged with providing for the general welfare.” Vice President Alexander Stephens most succinctly expressed the Confederate cause: “Our new government . . . rests on the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”21

  Although most northerners viewed with mingled sorrow and outrage the breakaway of seven states, there were exceptions. Horace Greely, the New York Tribune’s outspoken editor, was among those who waved good riddance to the rebels. Like most of his fellow abolitionists, he believed that a truncated United States whose members lived up to American ideals was superior to one that tolerated the evil of slavery among nearly half the states.

  Not every slave state embraced secession when the motion was raised. In the first months of 1861 majorities of either legislators or voters rejected drives for secessionist conventions in the Upper South of Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina and the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. After Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the rebellion, each of those states would reopen the debate over whether or not to secede.

  As each state in the Lower South rebelled it seized any federal forts, arsenals, warehouses, dockyards, and other federal property in its territory. Louisiana stole a fortune when it appropriated the U.S. mint in New Orleans. Texas alone took over nineteen federal forts. Only two federal strongholds held out, because they were sited on islands guarding the entrances to bays, Fort Sumter at Charleston and Fort Pickens at Pensacola.

  The Civil War’s first shots exploded on January 9, when South Carolina gunners opened fire on the Star of the West, flying the American flag and packe
d with supplies and 250 troops, as it sailed to Fort Sumter. The vessel’s captain prudently reversed course and sailed back to New York. In firing on the American flag, the gunners and the officials who ordered them to do so committed treason, the first of countless such acts over the next four years.22

  2

  Civil War, 1861–1865

  7

  Limited War

  The Union is older than any of the States, and in fact created them as States.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. . . . The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Forward to Richmond!

  NEW YORK TRIBUNE

  We have had no war; we have not even been playing at war.

  EDWIN STANTON

  Retreat? No, I propose to attack at daybreak and lick them.

  ULYSSES S. GRANT

  As the secession crisis unfolded Abraham Lincoln remained at Springfield. Like any president-elect, he faced a tedious four-month wait until the inauguration. Yet this interval was anything but uneventful. He viewed the secession of one southern state after another with increasing alarm. As someone who revered the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln certainly believed in the right to revolt against tyrants, but without “a morally justifiable cause . . . revolution is no right but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.”1 And this was exactly how Lincoln viewed the secessionists.

  Lincoln mulled various compromise proposals that might entice the rebel states back into the Union. He tentatively endorsed the one proposed by the House and Senate committees to strengthen the Fugitive Slave Act, promise not to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and even support a Thirteenth Amendment that forbade the federal government from intervening in any state’s practice of slavery, but he adamantly opposed any extension of slavery to the western territories: “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery.”2 In the end, he and his advisors deemed it best that he not publicly say anything until after he took the presidential oath. He would leave it to the lame-duck Buchanan administration and Congress to deal with the worsening crisis.

  He spent most of these months assembling his administration. His first step was to choose John Nicolay and John Hay as his secretaries.3 Their initial task was to screen the hordes of office seekers who lined up outside Lincoln’s office on the second floor of the capitol at Springfield. He was determined to have an administration loyal from top to bottom. To this end he eventually purged 1,520 of 1,195 high-ranking Buchanan appointees and replaced them with Republicans. This was just the top of the bureaucratic pyramids. The federal government employed 40,621 civilians in 1861, a number that soared to 195,000 by 1865.4

  Lincoln’s most important job was to assemble his cabinet, later dubbed his “team of rivals” since it included many who had opposed him for the Republican Party nomination along with three Democrats.5

  The first man Lincoln tapped was his greatest rival. William Seward gratefully accepted the post of secretary of state.6 He was Lincoln’s senior by eight years of life and countless worldly experiences. He had graduated from Union College, soon passed the bar exam, and developed a brilliant career as a lawyer. Like Lincoln he was a once-fervent Whig who became an equally fervent Republican. In all he served four years in New York’s senate, twelve years in the U.S. Senate, and four years as New York’s governor. He was as good-hearted as he was self-confident, intelligent, and politically savvy. He was a Renaissance man who loved the theater, painting, literature, travel in Europe, fine meals and wines, and horticulture. Initially he disdained Lincoln and sought to be the administration’s real power behind a figurehead president. This swiftly changed as Seward saw the political genius, indomitable will, and sterling character behind Lincoln’s homespun façade. They became close friends who shared many an evening in amiable conversation after spending the day in terse discussions about how to win the war and then the peace.

  Lincoln next chose Salmon Chase as treasury secretary.7 Chase followed up a Kenyon College education with a law career and a succession of public offices that led him into Ohio’s governor’s mansion. As an outspoken abolitionist, he was the cabinet’s most radical Republican. While he claimed to love humanity, he found individual relationships irksome. This natural tendency was compounded by the overwhelming sorrow of having to bury three wives in succession. Lincoln tried hard to like him and eventually failed. Chase compensated for his dour personality with genuine achievements, most notably by devising an elaborate constitutional case for abolition and spearheading the enactment of the Republican Party’s economic agenda. In return, Lincoln rewarded Chase by naming him the Supreme Court’s chief justice.

  Among all those he asked to join his cabinet, Lincoln was reluctant to give anything, let alone the War Department, to Simon Cameron.8 Cameron was a two-term senator whose Pennsylvania political machine was notorious for corruption, and a former moderate Democrat who had defected to the Republicans. When asked about Cameron’s character, Senator Thaddeus Stevens quipped that he had once believed that Cameron would not steal a red-hot stove but recently had to apologize for changing his mind on the question.9 Although Lincoln had warned his campaign manager not to cut any deals at the Republican convention, he felt honor-bound to fulfill Davis’s promise of a cabinet post to Cameron for the vote of his state’s delegation.

  The personalities Lincoln chose to fill the big three cabinet positions—the secretaries of state, treasury, and war—tended to overshadow the four second-tier posts. Edward Bates agreed to be Lincoln’s attorney general. He was a moderate Missouri Democrat who had served in that state’s assembly and courts and as a representative to Congress. Gideon Welles was another Jacksonian Democrat who had evolved toward the political center. He proved to be an excellent secretary of the navy. For postmaster general, Lincoln chose Montgomery Blair. His father was Francis Blair, a political master who once had been a Jacksonian but had recently converted to Republicanism. Blair was an outstanding postmaster general. He turned a $10 million deficit into an $861,000 surplus by 1865, largely by raising fees and cutting waste.10 The least distinguished cabinet member was Caleb Smith, who headed the Interior Department; Smith was a former Indiana Whig and current Republican.11

  The day before his fifty-second birthday, Lincoln gave a poignant farewell address in Springfield:

  My Friends: No one . . . can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested on Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail.12

  Then Lincoln and his family boarded the first of a series of trains that carried them from Springfield to Washington. He turned that journey into a twelve-day whistle-stop tour across the northern states to rally them for national unity and against secession. In all, he traveled 1,904 miles on eighteen different trains, with daily stops along the way to speak or spend the night, most notably at Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, New York, and Philadelphia.13

  His most haunting sojourn and remarks were at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Founders crafted and approved the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. As he spoke there on George Washington’s birthday, he was “filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing in this place from which sprang the institutions under which we live.” He expressed his political philosophy’s essence: “I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments
embodied in the Declaration of Independence. . . . It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” He then asked the key question of their time: “Now, my friends, can this country be saved on that basis?”14

  An overnight train brought the Lincolns to Washington City before dawn on February 23. At the station entrance the weary travelers climbed into a carriage that clattered through the dark, nearly deserted streets to the Willard Hotel, where they resided for the next ten days. From then until his inauguration, the president-elect visited Buchanan at the White House, spoke with key members of Congress, and conferred with his cabinet.

  By noon on March 4, 1861, the inauguration day was clear skied but chilly; a shower early that morning had dampened the dust. Outgoing president James Buchanan arrived by carriage before the Willard Hotel and President-Elect Abraham Lincoln climbed in beside him. They rode the few blocks to the East Portico of the Capitol with its unfinished dome. This was not the city’s only uncompleted symbol of American aspirations for greatness. Midway down the mall the Washington Monument was half done; the project started in 1848 but halted abruptly in 1854 as funds ran out and patriotic supporters failed to muster majorities willing to renew them in a bitterly divided Congress.