On the same day that Lincoln concluded his cabinet-building he got news which threatened to shatter the very consensus he sought to develop. His inaugural had been designed to provide a breathing space, to give the loyal elements in the rebel states a chance to assert themselves. Instead, he learned from the commander of the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson, that without further supplies the Union force could survive only another six weeks before surrendering to the Confederate authorities in Charleston. Lincoln now faced the most testing introduction to executive office of any president. He later reflected “that all the troubles and anxieties of his life” had no equal to those that bore down on him over the next five and a half weeks.41 As the emergency built to its climax in a bombardment of the fort, he strained to devise and maintain a course of action.
In this he had to contend with a variety of handicaps, some of them personal and self-inflicted. Executive business was sometimes delayed because he made procedural mistakes (he felt, he said, “like the Justice of the Peace, who would often speak of the first case he had ever tried, and called it, his ‘great first case least understood’”). More seriously, he consumed far too much time dealing personally with the hordes of job-seekers who day and night clogged up the White House. He was “so badgered,” he told an old friend, that sometimes he thought “the only way that he could escape from them would be to take a rope and hang himself” from a tree on the South Lawn. “Why don’t you disperse the selfish, mercenary crowd?” demanded Orville Browning, alarmed by his friend’s fatigue.42 But Lincoln valued personal oversight of patronage appointments too highly to relinquish the business. Perhaps, too, he found in this multitude of finite and manageable tasks an emotional refuge from the larger, more dangerous issues that loomed.
His ensuing exhaustion would have mattered less had he been confident of sound advice and solid information. But the voices of his military and political advisers sang an uncertain and disharmonious tune, and sound intelligence was hard to come by. General Winfield Scott offered a dispiriting response to Lincoln’s inquiries. Anderson’s surrender was inevitable: the troop numbers and naval force required to relieve him could not be raised in time. But Gustavus Vasa Fox, an ex–naval officer to whom Lincoln warmed, took a more positive view. When Lincoln on March 15 asked his cabinet members for their written views, the only advocates of reinforcement were Chase and Blair, Fox’s brother-in-law. Seward, still hopeful of a successful negotiation and confident that he was the man to pursue it, stood resolutely against any action that might erupt into civil war. To get a better sense of opinion in the lower South, Lincoln sent his friends Stephen A. Hurlbut and Hill Lamon to Charleston and learned the bleak news that Union sentiment was dead in South Carolina: “There is positively nothing to appeal to,” Hurlbut reported. “The Sentiment of National Patriotism . . . has been Extinguished.” The next day, March 28, General Scott stunned Lincoln with new advice: not only Sumter, but Fort Pickens, off the Florida coast, should be evacuated too. His argument was political, not military: giving up this securely held Union fort would “soothe” the eight states of the upper South and ensure their continued loyalty. Blair plausibly suspected that Scott was acting as Seward’s mouthpiece, though when on March 29 Lincoln asked cabinet members for their views on the relief of each of the two forts, the secretary of state joined in a unanimous vote for sustaining Pickens. Seward continued to oppose the relief of Sumter, but now the cabinet balance had swung and only Smith stood by him.43
Winfield Scott (1786–1866), a southerner and a hero of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, but by 1861 gouty and fat, was a loyal if unhelpful general-in-chief during the Sumter crisis. His “Anaconda Plan” of driving a wedge down the Mississippi and choking the Confederacy to death had strategic merit but was too passive for Lincoln. Friction with McClellan prompted Scott to resign in October 1861, though the president continued to consult him.
The events of these two days marked a crisis that left Lincoln fraught and migrainous, but finally resolved to act. He told Welles and Cameron on March 29 to prepare an expedition for Sumter that might leave as early as April 6. He also ordered a separate relief expedition to Pickens to proceed. But even now Lincoln’s plans were hampered by interdepartmental secrecy, a lack of liaison, and outright rivalry between the navy and army, respectively responsible for the separate Sumter and Pickens operations. Through an oversight of his own, and the scheming of Seward, who continued to hope for the failure of the Sumter enterprise and who had indirectly pledged to Confederate commissioners in Washington that the fort would be evacuated, the best ship was denied to Fox’s fleet, which set out for South Carolina from New York on April 9. By then Lincoln had told Anderson that supplies were on their way and that the fort would be reinforced if the Confederates resisted. He had also, at Seward’s encouragement, notified the governor of South Carolina that he should “expect an attempt to supply Fort-Sumpter with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made, without further notice.” The message left the Confederate authorities at Montgomery unmoved. When Fox’s fleet arrived, on April 12, Charleston’s guns fired the first shots of the Civil War.44
For all the uncertainty that characterized these weeks, there was still continuity and coherence in what Lincoln did. He navigated a course between the two express commitments he had entered into in his inaugural. First, he would not preside over the erosion of the Union. Whatever ambiguity existed as to whether he was going to retake lost forts, he had been entirely clear about holding those still under Union control. He continued to stand by what he had told Scott and others throughout the winter. These garrisons, and especially Sumter, situated as it was in the crucible of secessionism, were potent symbols of national authority. For the administration voluntarily to abandon them would be to confirm to the watching public the nation’s own suicide. Despite insistent voices demanding a “hands off” policy to reassure southern Unionism and defuse the crisis, Lincoln showed little sign of yielding.45
One version of events in early April suggests that Lincoln did at the last moment entertain the idea of evacuating Sumter, as an exchange for a pledge of undying Unionism from Virginia. There anti-secessionists dominated the sitting state convention. Seward, still working for a change of policy toward Sumter, raised Lincoln’s hopes of the swap. “A state for a fort is no bad business,” the president allegedly remarked. John B. Baldwin, a convention member, came to the White House for a furtive conversation on April 4. By his own account he received no hard offer. Perhaps Lincoln did make one. If so, he did it so indirectly that it left Baldwin mystified. Either way, the evidence remains inconclusive.46 It is more than likely that Lincoln had far less faith in Baldwin’s ability to deliver than had Seward and that, having made a crossing of the psychological Rubicon by his orders of March 29, he could not go back.
The second of Lincoln’s inaugural commitments was his promise not to coerce or assail the South. This effectively ruled out repossessing lost installations, or preemptive strikes against the Confederates to ensure the security of forts still held. The logic of standing by his two promises was to wait for the Confederates to react, perhaps forcibly, to the nonviolent upholding of federal authority. In debating Lincoln’s intentions within this framework for action, historians have spilled gallons more ink than the blood shed at the time of Sumter’s fall, when but one life was lost. The interpretations run the gamut from those that see him recognizing at an early date the inevitability of war, and deliberately maneuvering the Confederates into shooting first and attracting the blame for hostilities, to the more sympathetic judgment that Lincoln did all he could to maintain peace in a context where the other side had already, through secession, engaged in political violence and revolution, and where there was just a chance that the Confederates might avoid using force against unarmed relief efforts. In the absence of cast-iron evidence about the workings of Lincoln’s mind, the debate cannot be un
answerably resolved. But some things are beyond reasonable doubt.
Lincoln himself quite soon after the Sumter crisis told his brother-in-law “how intensely anxious he had been to arrange the national troubles without war—how deep his sympathies were with both sections of the country—and how hard he had struggled to avoid bloodshed.” The president’s stress-induced sickness in the last days of March provides a measure of this particular anxiety. But it showed, too, that Lincoln knew he was running a high risk of war by ordering a relief expedition to Sumter. Not only had the Confederates fired on the merchant steamer Star of the West when Buchanan had tried to send supplies in January, but Hurlbut had just reported that any attempted reprovisioning would provoke Charlestonians’ resistance. Before Fox’s fleet departed, Lincoln met several northern state governors at the White House to discuss the preparedness of state militias and the availability of troops for the defense of Washington. Two months earlier he had shared with Browning the view that “far less evil & bloodshed would result from an effort to maintain the Union and the Constitution, than from disruption and the formation of two confederacies.” It was a position that the crisis forced him to review but not, when it came to the crunch, to change. Whether he would have done so had he known the scale of the human suffering that would follow is as much an imponderable for the historian as the moral rightness or wrongness of the decision that he took.47
Lincoln’s executive leadership during these weeks drew criticism from Union loyalists at the time and has not won universal approval from historians since. He has been charged with groping his way, being slow to take initiatives and to secure information, too ready to wait on events. Edwin M. Stanton, a robust Unionist, accused Lincoln and his colleagues of being gripped by mounting panic as they addressed the Sumter problem. Carl Schurz and other activists told him that demoralized Republicans blamed the party’s recent losses in local elections on the administration’s vacillation and apparent readiness to back down. The secretary of state implicitly charged the president with drift, in a notorious memorandum to Lincoln, dated April 1: “We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign.” Editorial columns warmed to the theme. The government’s approach, lamented the New York Times, was nothing “beyond that of listless waiting to see what may ‘turn up.’”48
But Lincoln had inherited a nightmare that left him with few realistic options. The route of peaceful separation was anathema to him and rejected by a majority of northerners. That of coercing the seceding states back into the Union was closed, since he lacked the means: neither the outgoing president nor Congress had made any provision for augmenting the entirely inadequate forces of the regular army and the ramshackle state militias. Given his relative helplessness, what is remarkable is Lincoln’s decision to resist calling Congress into special session, and his appetite for taking responsibility himself. When Seward brazenly suggested that he himself take on the “energetic prosecution” of a new policy, turning attention from domestic to foreign affairs, Lincoln remarked “that if this must be done, I must do it,” dryly adding that in addressing the evolution of policy “I wish, and suppose I am entitled to have the advice of all the cabinet.”49 Whatever the stresses of executive office, Lincoln would not dodge them or load them onto others.
In one essential in particular, Lincoln proved more than adept. He followed a course shrewdly designed to maximize support for the administration if and when hostilities broke out. He remained sensitive to public views in the loyal states at a time when the swirls and shifts of opinion made it no easy matter to define and keep abreast of the popular mood. Party labels during these weeks provided no assured guide to attitudes toward what was, after all, an unprecedented crisis. Republicans themselves responded variously to the rumors stoked in mid-March by Seward’s intimations to the Confederate commissioners that the president would peacefully relinquish Sumter. Some party loyalists reassured Lincoln, whose policy they assumed it was, that this was the only realistic military option, and no dishonor. A few anxiously hoped that evacuation would be part of a drive to secure reunion through conciliation. One New England editor even jettisoned the Chicago platform and called for a compromise on territorial slavery. Mostly, though, Republicans were determined not to let the growing “vigor, intelligence, and success” of the de facto Confederate government be used as an argument for appeasement. During late March and early April, with the Union apparently enervated, a more militant note widely entered the Republican press and was echoed by Lincoln’s correspondents. Those who had advocated delay, to allow time for national healing and the revival of southern Unionism, were now far readier to reconsider military action. The pulse quickened further during the first week of April, when it became clearer that the administration was going to act to defend its property. A Milwaukee editor aired the common thought that “there are worse evils than war.”50
Amongst non-Republicans, too, the patterns of response proved far from predictable. Douglas’s patriotic praise for Lincoln’s inaugural marked a sensational and significant break with the Democrats’ assault on Republican fanaticism, though its effect was rather to complicate opposition politics, not to halt them. The Little Giant himself was involved in a mid-March Senate standoff with Republicans over how to interpret Lincoln’s speech. For Douglas it meant peace, and he wanted Republicans to shore up that policy with constitutional guarantees. They, however, read it to mean merely that Lincoln would not make war on anyone; it did not commit him to conciliation or appeasement. In some desperation, and afraid that any clash over the forts would alienate the upper South, Douglas began to develop a scheme of peaceful separation within the framework of a customs union. Many northern Democrats followed Douglas’s lead as they moved into these uncharted political waters, mixing some partisan criticism of the administration with evident anxiety over the future of the Union. Some Democratic nationalists, however, proved even harsher critics of Lincoln’s “weakness” than those of his own party: several Breckinridge men of the previous November now abandoned their southern-rights champion, and urged Lincoln not to cringe before “southern dictation” and “the phantom prowess of the boasting traitors.” And old-style Unionist Whigs, faced with either enforcing the Constitution and law or protecting the nation from the danger of war, fractured into those who criticized Lincoln’s “supineness, cowardice, imbecility” in confronting traitors, and others for whom enforcement “would be the greatest folly in this age of follies.”51
But for all the eddies and swirls of opinion, the wider current flowed in only one direction: there was an underlying and near-universal assumption that by one means or another the “holy cause” of Union must be sustained.52 Even those who urged peaceful separation mostly did so in the belief that the “Cotton Confederacy” would be ready to return to the Union within a few years. Lincoln’s task, then, was to shape his actions to present the Union as itself the victim of assault in any confrontation, not as the aggressor, and so harness the power of a deep popular patriotism. His likely final policy toward the forts was predicted by a perceptive Douglas Democrat several weeks in advance: acting defensively, the administration would “compel the seceded States to perform such acts of aggression or offense as should be resisted. Thus would the cause of war be cast upon the seceders.”53 And this, of course, was how the endgame at Sumter unfolded. Lincoln chose not to reinforce Anderson secretly, turned Fox’s expedition into an unarmed relief effort, and ensured that the world would see his pacific intent by notifying the governor of South Carolina of what he would do.
The guns at Sumter provided Unionists with a catharsis of action after weeks of suspense and anxiety. What Browning described as a “tempest of patriotic indignation” found expression in mass gatherings, religious meetings, state legislative chambers, and furious editorializing. Lincoln’s secretaries labored under a mountain of heartening mail. The bombardment of the fort had operated, declared an old Whig acquaintance of the president, “like an
electric shock upon the Northern mind.” Local Republican leaders pledged the administration all resources necessary to “crush the head of the rattle snake.” “The North West,” Joseph Medill promised Lincoln, “will back you with their last man, dollar and bushel of corn.” “Men and money at this crisis, will be forthcoming to any amount,” insisted another. The administration could rely on an army of three, four, five hundred thousand men—perhaps three quarters of a million, if needed.54
Conscience and countinghouse appeared to rally as one in defense of the national government. A variety of individual Christians and church gatherings—Indiana and New York Methodists, Philadelphia Presbyterians, Welsh Congregationalists, New England clergy—rushed to tell the president of their resolve. Lincoln should understand, a New Hampshire correspondent told him, that “the friends of the Pilgrims are your friends.” At the same time, the caution of conservative financiers, merchants, and manufacturers vaporized in the intense heat of patriotism, leaving John Hay to rejoice that, while cotton had for too long shut northern ears “to every sound but the jingling of dollars,” the storm of outrage proved “that the voice of a Puritan conscience is louder than the hum of a thousand looms.”55
Everywhere, it seemed, common anger at the South’s perfidy welded together previous political antagonists. Chicago Republicans and Demo-crats were “a unit,” Isaac Arnold telegraphed Lincoln. In Wisconsin they stood “shoulder to shoulder.” Pennsylvania knew “no division of parties.” Democratic stalwarts and previous anti-coercionists in New York now “desire to know no party but the union party until the question is settled whether we have a Government or not”: “I did not vote for Lincoln,” said one, “but I would vote for him now, just as I would for Washington, Jefferson, Jackson.” Even the southern-rights Democrats of lower Illinois, Trumbull reported, had had to succumb to the strength of public sentiment. Fearing an attack on the offices of his southern-leaning New York Herald and stunned by the evidence of northern single-mindedness, the editor James Gordon Bennett enjoyed a Pauline conversion and declared, “There will now be but one party, one question, one issue, one purpose in the Northern States—that of sustaining the government.”56
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