Two Miserable Presidents

by Steve Sheinkin

  How would you like to be president at a moment like this?

  The Last President?

  The man who had the job, James Buchanan, couldn’t wait to go home. Buchanan still had four months to go until Lincoln took over. Pretty sure the country wouldn’t last that long, he often cried out:

  “I am the last president of the United States!”

  Buchanan had good reason to worry. On December 20, South Carolina seceded from the United States. Six more states quickly followed: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Leaders from these seven states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form their own government and write their own constitution. They decided to call themselves the Confederate States of America.

  James Buchanan

  Davis Is Disappointed

  On February 10, 1861, Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina, were cutting roses in the garden of their Mississippi plantation. Jefferson Davis was expecting big news—and dreading it.

  When Mississippi seceded from the Union, Davis had resigned from the United States Senate and traveled home. Now he was trying to enjoy a few quiet days on his Mississippi plantation. This was a man badly in need of a vacation. He was exhausted from years in politics. And he suffered from a nerve disease that caused unbearable headaches, making it feel as if the bones of his face were grinding together.

  But Davis knew that the new Confederate government was meeting in Alabama. And he suspected they might give him a very important job—maybe commander of the army, or possibly even president. “I would prefer not to have either place,” he said.

  So Jefferson was worried when a messenger rode up with a telegram. And his face twisted with pain as he read the words. Varina thought someone in the family had died, until he read her the telegram:

  “Sir: We are directed to inform you that you are this day unanimously elected President of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America, and to request you to come to Montgomery immediately.”

  Varina said her husband spoke of the news “as a man might speak of a sentence of death.” Davis had been chosen, though, and he intended to do the job. “I will do my best,” he told her. Huge crowds cheered Davis’s train as he traveled to Montgomery. He went to work in an office with “The President” written on a piece of paper and tacked onto the door.

  “The South is determined to maintain her position,” Davis declared, “and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder.” Gunpowder, that is. Peace was still possible—on one condition. “All we ask is to be let alone,” Davis said.

  But was there really any chance that the Confederate states would be “let alone”? Would the United States government allow seven states to simply break away from the country without a fight?

  What do you say, Mr. Lincoln?

  A Long Way to Washington

  Lincoln couldn’t answer this question yet. He was still in Springfield, helplessly watching the country fall apart. He spent his days surrounded by an endless stream of visitors. Some came to meet him or interview him. Some came to ask for high-paying government jobs. Lincoln said his face hurt from smiling so much. “I am sick of office-holding already,” he said, long before actually taking office.

  It was during this tense and annoying time that Lincoln made a major change in his appearance. Before the election, an eleven-year-old girl from Westfield, New York, named Grace Bedell had written to Lincoln, saying, “My father is going to vote for you, and if I was a man I would vote for you too.” She promised to try to convince her brothers to vote for Lincoln—but she felt his chances of winning would be better if he grew a beard. “If you will let your whiskers grow,” she wrote, “I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you. You would look a great deal better, for your face is so thin.”

  Lincoln agreed that his face could use some improvement (actually, he felt he was one of the ugliest men he had ever seen). And he began growing that famous beard that everyone pictures when they think of Abraham Lincoln.

  In February the Lincoln family packed up their stuff. Lincoln wrote his new address on each trunk: “A. Lincoln, The White House, Washington, D.C.” On the way to Washington, Lincoln stopped to make speeches in dozens of towns—including Westfield, New York. “I have a correspondent in this place,” Lincoln told the crowd in Westfield. “If she is present I would like to see her.”

  “Who is it?” the people shouted. “Give us the name.”

  “Her name is Grace Bedell,” Lincoln said. “She wrote me that she thought I would be better looking if I wore whiskers.”

  Grace walked up to the stage to meet the next president. Lincoln bent down and said, “You see, I let these whiskers grow for you, Grace.” He gave her a kiss, and the people cheered.

  The rest of Lincoln’s trip to Washington was not as fun. He kept hearing rumors that assassins were going to murder him when he stopped to make a speech in Baltimore. So he decided to skip the Baltimore visit. With a heavily armed friend sitting beside him, Lincoln tried to sleep as his train sped through the night toward Washington. When he arrived at six in the morning, there were no crowds there to greet him—no one knew he was about to show up. He stepped off the train and went to a hotel for breakfast.

  Newspapers made fun of Lincoln’s arrival, laughing at the idea of a president sneaking into Washington. Cartoons even showed Lincoln traveling in ridiculous disguises—in some drawings he wore clothes borrowed from his wife. Lincoln wasn’t even president yet, and he was off to an awful start.

  President, Finally

  Lincoln finally became president on March 4, 1861. Rumors of a planned assassination were still swirling, so the inauguration ceremony outside the Capitol Building was a bit tense. Everything went fine, though, except for one scary moment when a man fell loudly from a nearby tree. He wasn’t up there to shoot anyone, though—he just wanted a good view of the ceremony.

  The whole country was eager to hear Lincoln’s inaugural speech. Seven Southern states had already left the Union and several more were thinking about seceding.

  Lincoln made his opinion clear: individual states did not have the right to secede from the United States. If people were unhappy with recent events in the country, they were free to try to make new laws or even amend the Constitution. But as president, Lincoln said, it was his job to protect the Union. He urged the states that had seceded to come back before it was too late: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.”

  Lincoln was basically warning the Southern states: Don’t do anything you might regret. He didn’t talk directly about the crisis brewing at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. But he was thinking about it, and so was everyone else. If there was going to be a civil war, it was probably going to start there. And soon.

  Showdown at Fort Sumter

  Fort Sumter was a brick fort on a tiny island just off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. Inside the fort were about eighty United States soldiers, commanded by Major Robert Anderson.

  Outside the fort, along the Charleston waterfront, were five thousand Southern volunteers with guns and cannons pointed at Fort Sumter. These men considered the fort to be the property of the Confederate States of America. They wanted it turned over to them—now.

  On his first full day as president, Lincoln faced a tricky decision. Anderson and his men in Fort Sumter were running out of food. Lincoln could give up the fort, but that would basically be admitting that South Carolina and the other Confederate states were already independent. He could send in U.S. warships, but that could easily spark shooting, and a huge war.

  Any advice for the president?

  Lincoln came up with a third option. He announced that he was sending in an unarmed supply ship. It would carry food but no soldiers or weapons. This was clever, because it forced Jefferson Davis to make the next tough decision. Davis could let the food into Fort
Sumter, but then Anderson and his men would be there forever. He could blow the ship out of the water, but it would look pretty bad to fire on a ship that was trying to deliver food to hungry soldiers.

  Davis sent new orders to General P.G.T. Beauregard, commander of the Confederate forces in Charleston. Beauregard was to demand that Robert Anderson surrender Fort Sumter immediately, before the supply ship had time to arrive. This was a little awkward for Beauregard, who had been a student in Anderson’s artillery class at West Point, the U.S. military college. But Beauregard had no choice. He ordered his former teacher to surrender.

  Anderson politely refused.

  The First Shots

  Mary Chesnut was in Charleston, following the story moment by moment. “Why did that green goose Anderson go into Fort Sumter?” she wrote in her diary. “Then everything began to go wrong.” Anderson had until four a.m. of April 12 to surrender Fort Sumter. A few hours before this deadline, Chesnut was writing: “I do not pretend to sleep. How can I? If Anderson does not accept terms at four, the orders are he shall be fired upon.”

  At four thirty that morning, Chesnut heard “the heavy booming of a cannon.” She jumped out of bed, said a quick prayer, then ran to the roof of her house and watched the Civil War begin.

  Beauregard and his men were blasting forty cannons at Fort Sumter, streaking the early-morning sky with orange and red. Fires broke out all over the fort, and the men inside began choking on the smoke. “The scene at this time was really terrific,” reported Captain Abner Doubleday, who was inside the fort. Soldiers were surrounded by “the roaring and crackling of the flames, the dense masses of whirling smoke, the bursting of the enemy’s shells.”

  Anderson and his men held out for about thirty hours, then surrendered. Amazingly, no one was killed in the fighting. But before leaving the fort, Anderson fired a salute to the American flag—a military tradition. A cannon exploded, accidentally killing Private Daniel Hough. He was the first man to die in the Civil War.

  As you will see, almost nothing in this war would go as planned.

  Brother Against Brother?

  The Fort Sumter news spread quickly across the country. Sixteen-year-old Theodore Upson was working with his father on the family farm in Indiana when a neighbor ran up and said, “The rebs [short for rebels] have fired upon and taken Fort Sumter!”

  “Father got white and couldn’t say a word,” Upson remembered.

  That night the family sat around the dinner table, talking about what would happen next.

  Grandma: Oh, my poor children in the South! Now they will suffer!

  Father: They can come here and stay.

  Grandma: No, they will not do that. There is their home. There they will stay. Oh, to think that I should have lived to see the day when brother should rise against brother!

  Were brothers really about to fight against brothers? It sure looked like it. People in the North were furious about the Fort Sumter attack. United as never before, they poured into city streets, waving flags and shouting things like “Death to traitors!” One man at a New York City rally declared: “We shall crush out this rebellion as an elephant would trample on a mouse.”

  Lincoln didn’t think it would be quite that easy, but he did hope a strong show of force would help. He called on every state to send soldiers to Washington. He wanted a total of 75,000 troops to serve for ninety days.

  Lincoln’s call for troops united the South in the same way that the Fort Sumter attack united the North. Southerners were being told to send troops to fight against other Southerners! Not likely! Not only did Southern governors refuse the president’s order, but they wrote back nasty letters, such as this one from the governor of Tennessee:

  “Tennessee will furnish not a single man for the purpose of coercion2, but fifty thousand if necessary for the defense of our rights and those of our Southern brothers.”

  Just two days after his call for troops, Lincoln watched his nightmare come to life—more states started dropping from the Union. Virginia seceded, followed by Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The Confederacy now had eleven states and a new capital city—Richmond, Virginia, just one hundred miles from Washington, D.C.

  Governor Isham Harris

  Both sides raced to get ready for war.

  Off to War

  Busting with patriotism, thousands of young men rushed to sign up for military service. “So impatient did I become for starting,” said one Arkansas man, “I felt like ten thousand pins were pricking me in every part of the body.” An Indiana man gave another reason for enlisting: “If a fellow wants to go with a girl now he had better enlist.” Everyone on both sides expected this to be a very short war, and they wanted to get in on the action before it was too late.

  All over the South volunteers jumped onto trains, then shouted and sang as they rolled toward Richmond. Southern women were excited too—even more excited than the men, according to a young Georgia woman, who wrote “The women of the South generally were altogether in favor of secession and of the war, if there had to be a war, and if the Southern men had not been willing to go, I reckon they would have been made to go by the women.”

  “I wish that women could fight,” added eighteen-year-old Lucy Breckinridge of Virginia. “I would gladly shoulder my pistol and shoot some Yankees if it were allowable.”

  The same wave of patriotic excitement swept through Northern towns, where eager volunteers paraded before cheering crowds. As a group of Massachusetts soldiers marched out of town on their way to Washington, family members ran out to give the boys last-minute gifts.

  “Our mothers—God bless them!—had brought us something good to eat—pies, cakes, doughnuts, and jellies … . Our young ladies, (sisters, of course) brought us … needles, pins, thread, buttons, and scissors.”

  Warren Goss

  Warren Goss remembered that one mother actually handed her son an umbrella. Not only was this really embarrassing for the son, but it gives us an idea of how young and inexperienced these men were. Imagine a soldier bringing an umbrella into battle!

  Lee Makes His Choice

  In an upstairs room in his Virginia home, fifty-four-year-old Colonel Robert E. Lee was pacing back and forth, trying to make up his mind. On the one hand, Lee opposed secession and slavery. And he loved the U.S. Army, in which he had served his entire adult life. On the other hand, he felt he could never fight against his home state of Virginia.

  All over the country, people were facing the same question: Are you for the Union or the Confederacy? This question split many families in two, with some family members marching north and others heading south. The Kentucky senator John Crittenden watched one of his sons become a general in the Union army and the other become a general in the Confederate army. And how do you think Abe Lincoln felt when he heard that four of his wife’s brothers were fighting for the South!

  Even the United States Army was ripped in two. Soldiers who had spent years serving together now had to choose sides in the Civil War. There were plenty of teary farewell scenes as lifelong friends shook hands and hugged … then marched off to fight against each other.

  Robert E. Lee finally decided to resign from the U.S. Army. He walked downstairs and said sadly to his wife, “Well, Mary, the question is settled. Here is my letter of resignation.”

  He gave the letter to a very disappointed General Winfield Scott, commander of the U.S. Army. Scott had been hoping Lee would take command of Union forces—he called Lee the very best soldier I ever saw in the field.”

  “I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern states,” Lee told Scott.

  “You have made the greatest mistake of your life,” Scott replied. “But I feared it would be so.”

  Then Lee had to write another difficult letter—this one to his sister, a supporter of the Union. “You must think as kindly of me as you can,” he wrote to her.

  “With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not
been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.”

  Robert E. Lee

  The Confederate government offered Lee command of Virginia’s military forces. Lee took the job. On the train to Richmond, he looked out the window and saw crowds of people joyfully celebrating Virginia’s secession. This only made him more depressed. It seemed to Lee like the whole country was going crazy.

  Now What, Lincoln?

  Abraham Lincoln wasn’t thrilled with current events either.

  From the White House lawn, Lincoln could look across the Potomac River and see Confederate flags flying in Virginia. A Virginia newspaper boasted that Lincoln lived in constant fear of being captured. “Old Abe has his legs in perfect readiness to run,” the paper claimed. “He does not so much as take off his boots.”

  This was not quite true. The pressure on Lincoln was building, though. Most Union soldiers had volunteered for just ninety days, so Lincoln had to act quickly. Northern newspapers reminded him of this every day, shouting slogans like “Forward to Richmond!” But Lincoln had no idea how to fight a war. He borrowed books on military strategy from the Library of Congress and stayed up late studying them.