by H. W. Brands
Lincoln put the matter to Winfield Scott, asking how long Fort Sumter could hold out in the absence of fresh supplies, and what would be required to reinforce and defend it. Scott wasn’t optimistic. The fort might hold out for six weeks, he said, but securing the place would require twenty-five thousand men, a fleet of ships, new acts of Congress and six to eight months. Until then, the South Carolinians could take the fort at their leisure.
William Seward, now secretary of state, agreed that Fort Sumter was indefensible. On April 1, Seward sketched what he called “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration.” He began with a chiding: “We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign.” Seward granted the need for dealing with appointments and other tasks faced by any new administration. “But further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the Administration, but danger upon the country,” Seward continued.
What to do? “Change the question before the public from one upon slavery, or about slavery for a question upon Union or disunion. In other words, from what would be regarded as a party question to one of patriotism or Union.” Seward recommended evacuating Fort Sumter, indefensible anyway, and reinforcing the remaining federal forts in the South. Navy ships in foreign waters should be recalled and readied for a blockade of the rebel states. “This will raise distinctly the question of Union or disunion,” Seward asserted.
To this point in Seward’s memorandum, Lincoln couldn’t disagree, though he might dislike the secretary’s tone. What came next convinced Lincoln that Seward had a screw loose. “I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once,” he said, presumably referring to explanations as to how they proposed to treat secession. “I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico and Central America, to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention. And if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, would convene Congress and declare war against them.”
Seward wasn’t finished. “But whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it. For this purpose it must be somebody’s business to pursue and direct it incessantly. Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it; or devolve it on some member of his Cabinet. Once adopted, debates on it must end, and all agree and abide. It is not in my especial province. But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.”
Lincoln hardly knew where to start in responding to Seward. He rejected the assertion that his administration lacked a policy; had the secretary not been listening at the inaugural address? Lincoln evinced puzzlement as to why abandoning Fort Sumter and defending other posts would shift the debate from slavery to disunion. He didn’t respond directly to Seward’s desire to foment a foreign crisis, even a war; Lincoln doubtless reckoned he had his hands full with one incipient war. As for Seward’s offer to crack the cabinet into line and pursue an energetic policy—thereby making Seward an assistant president, apparently—Lincoln said simply, “If this must be done, I must do it.”
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IN THE END Lincoln ordered the resupply of Fort Sumter. He didn’t expect the operation to succeed; rather he wanted to put the rebels in the position of firing the first shot. It came on April 12 and was followed by round after round of cannon fire upon the fort, which surrendered the next day.
Thus the war began. Lincoln hadn’t sought it; indeed he had taken pains—far too many for the likes of Frederick Douglass—to prevent it. But now that it had begun, by hostile action of the South Carolinians, he would match force with force, and then some. He called on the militias of the loyal states to rally to the Union and suppress the rebellion. Asking for seventy-five thousand volunteers, he said, “I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our national Union and the perpetuity of popular government.”
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AMONG THOSE ANSWERING Lincoln’s call was George Kimball of Boston, who enrolled in the Second Massachusetts Infantry Battalion, nicknamed the Tigers. Boston felt a special ownership interest in the American republic, with roots running to the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Bunker Hill. And as the hotbed of abolitionism, Boston took particular issue with a rebellion by slaveholders.
Shortly after George Kimball enlisted, the Tigers were repositioned to Fort Warren, an unfinished facility on one of the islands that guarded the entrance to Boston’s harbor. “We found the great fortress in a wretched state, very much as its builders had left it, with huge piles of earth, brick and stone encumbering its broad parade-ground and filling many of its casements,” Kimball recounted afterward. He and his comrades were put to work readying the place for war. “This involved a great deal of hard labor, which, the young men of the battalion being mainly of good social standing, was in strange contrast to former employments.” Yet President Lincoln had called and they would do their part. “They were a light-hearted, whole-souled set of fellows, and therefore accepted the situation without reservations of any kind, although it did not seem to be exactly that kind of military glory they were just then so thirsty for.”
To ease their labors, they did what people in comparable circumstances had done from time out of mind: they sang. “We had many good singers among us,” said Kimball, “and as nothing so effectually drives away weariness, particularly among soldiers and sailors, as a cheerful spirit and a joyous song, we constantly worked under the inspiration of these blessed agencies. We lustily sang all the popular songs of the day, whether wielding the shovel, swinging the pick, trundling the wheelbarrow, or rolling the heavy stones away. During our long evenings in quarters, too, we sang almost constantly.”
They ran through drinking songs to ballads and marches and hymns from church and revival meetings. A favorite from revivals was a tune called “Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us?” The melody was easy to learn, the words even more so, consisting of a single line repeated three times, followed by a new line and then the chorus.
As it happened, one of the battalion members was a fun-loving Scotsman named John Brown. Bearing the same name as the martyred abolitionist, this John Brown was deliberately confused with the other. “If he made his appearance a few minutes late among the working squad, or was a little tardy in falling into the company line, he was sure to be greeted with such expressions as ‘Come, old fellow, you ought to be at it if you are going to help us free the slaves’; or, ‘This can’t be John Brown—why, John Brown is dead.’ ” At some point one of the teasers, to emphasize that this John Brown couldn’t be the other, declared, “Yes, yes, poor old John Brown is dead; his body lies mouldering in the grave.”
It wasn’t long before one of the songsters matched the John Brown line to the “Say, Brothers” tune. The result became a favorite among the Tigers at Fort Warren, who sang it among themselves and for visitors. An enterprising music publisher of Charlestown, Massachusetts, heard it; he printed and sold lyrics sheets, with new verses added. The gist, the part everyone heard and remembered and that soldiers for the Union subsequently sang as they marched off to battle, was
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave
His soul is marching on!
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ABRAHAM LINCOLN GROANED anew when he heard the song. Lincoln had kept his distance from John Brown from the moment he learned of the Harpers Ferry raid; the last thing he wanted now was for his struggle to save the Union to be treated as an abolitionist crusade. Four more slave states had joined the original seven seceders after Fort Sumter and his call for volunteers, yet the remaining four—Delaware, M
aryland, Kentucky and Missouri—were still loyal. To keep these border states loyal, and to keep the Union’s capital from becoming an island in a Confederate sea, Lincoln needed to reassure them he wasn’t going to take away their slaves. Soldiers singing about John Brown did nothing but make his job harder.
It was plenty hard as things were. Enlistments proceeded apace; Lincoln’s request for seventy-five thousand volunteers was quickly oversubscribed by eager patriots like George Kimball, most of whom expected the conquest of the South to be a summer’s outing, if that. They, and everyone else on the Union side, discovered the grim truth in July when a Confederate army met an advancing Union force on the banks of a creek called Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia. The Federals had the better of the first hour of fighting but fell apart under Confederate counterattack. “It is now generally admitted that it was one of the best-planned battles of the war, but one of the worst-fought,” wrote William Sherman, who was wounded at Bull Run. “Our men had been told so often at home that all they had to do was make a bold appearance, and the rebels would run; and nearly all of us for the first time then heard the sound of cannon and muskets in anger, and saw the bloody scenes common to all battles, with which we were soon to be familiar. We had good organization, good men, but no cohesion, no real discipline, no respect for authority, no real knowledge of war. Both armies were fairly defeated, and whichever stood fast, the other would have run. Though the North was overwhelmed with mortification and shame, the South really had not much to boast of, for in the three or four hours of fighting their organization was so broken up that they did not and could not follow our army, when it was known to be in a state of disgraceful and causeless flight.”
The defeat at Bull Run sobered all on the Union side. The South would not be intimidated by show nor beaten in a summer. Lincoln looked for a new general and found George McClellan. He got Congress to approve the enlistment of half a million troops, for three years rather than the three months of the first volunteers. When Confederate president Jefferson Davis responded with a similar call for an expansion of Southern forces, both sides began preparing for a long conflict.
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BULL RUN AND its consequences cast a new light on the slavery question. Lincoln had hoped to suppress the rebellion quickly, without reference to slavery. When the rebellion persisted, and indeed thrived, the slavery question became harder to avoid. The abolitionists continued to hector him for not attacking the root cause of the conflict; even some of his generals thought they knew better than their commander in chief what to do about slavery. A month after Bull Run, John Frémont, now the general in charge of the Union’s western theater, declared martial law in Missouri. Frémont had always been impetuous, and having married into the family of Thomas Benton, he felt a special responsibility for Missouri. As a career soldier, he possessed far more military experience than Lincoln. Finally, and not least, as the initial standard-bearer of the Republican party, he thought he was as attuned as Lincoln to what the newly governing party stood for. Unlike Lincoln, who sought to keep slavery out of the discussion of war aims, Frémont sought to bring it front and center—to force Lincoln’s hand. And so, in declaring martial law in Missouri, he proclaimed the confiscation of the property of all who had taken arms against the Union, and added, “Their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free.”
Lincoln didn’t anger easily, but Frémont’s attempted coup set him off. The president immediately jerked the general back. “There is great danger that the closing paragraph, in relation to the confiscation of property and the liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends and turn them against us,” he wrote to Frémont. To avoid embarrassment—for Frémont and for himself—he asked the general to modify that part of his decree so as to make it conform to a recent act by Congress allowing the emancipation of only those slaves employed in hostile service against the United States.
Frémont wasn’t to be rebuked so easily. He replied to Lincoln that he had thought his policy appropriate when he announced it, and he still did. He would rescind the emancipation proclamation if the president directly ordered him to do so, but not otherwise.
Lincoln wasted no time and gave the order. When the president’s letter was released to the press—by Frémont or, possibly, his ambitious wife—the general was widely perceived as fearless and the president as timid.
Lincoln ignored most of the criticism. But he thought Orville Browning, an Illinois Republican, should have known better. Browning had taken Stephen Douglas’s seat in the Senate after Douglas suddenly fell ill and died. “Coming from you, I confess it astonishes me,” Lincoln wrote to Browning. “That you should object to my adhering to a law which you had assisted in making, and presenting to me, less than a month before, is odd enough. But this is a very small part. Genl. Fremont’s proclamation, as to confiscation of property, and the liberation of slaves, is purely political, and not within the range of military law, or necessity. If a commanding general finds a necessity to seize the farm of a private owner, for a pasture, an encampment, or a fortification, he has the right to do so, and to so hold it, as long as the necessity lasts; and this is within military law, because within military necessity. But to say the farm shall no longer belong to the owner or his heirs forever, and this as well when the farm is not needed for military purposes as when it is, is purely political, without the savor of military law about it. And the same is true of slaves. If the general needs them, he can seize them, and use them; but when the need is past, it is not for him to fix their permanent future condition. That must be settled according to laws made by law-makers, and not by military proclamations.”
Frémont had gone dangerously far, Lincoln said. “The proclamation in the point in question, is simply ‘dictatorship.’ It assumes that the general may do anything he pleases—confiscate the lands and free the slaves of loyal people, as well as of disloyal ones. And going the whole figure I have no doubt would be more popular with some thoughtless people than that which has been done. But I cannot assume this reckless position, nor allow others to assume it on my responsibility. You speak of it as being the only means of saving the government. On the contrary it is itself the surrender of the government. Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the U.S.—any government of Constitution and laws—wherein a general, or a president, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?”
Frémont’s decree, ungrounded in law, was equally misguided as policy, Lincoln said. “No doubt the thing was popular in some quarters, and would have been more so if it had been a general declaration of emancipation.” But it threw the administration’s efforts in the border states into disarray. “The Kentucky legislature”—then considering a vote of confidence in the Union—“would not budge till that proclamation was modified; and Gen. Anderson telegraphed me that on the news of Gen. Fremont having actually issued deeds of manumission, a whole company of our volunteers threw down their arms and disbanded. I was so assured as to think it probable that the very arms we had furnished Kentucky would be turned against us. I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capital.”
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FRÉMONT WASN’T the only general trying to force the president’s hand. David Hunter tested Lincoln’s patience on an almost-daily basis, complaining of being passed over for command positions to which he felt himself entitled. Lincoln declined to respond to most of the complaints but got fed up. “It is difficult to answer so ugly a letter in good temper,” he replied to Hunter’s latest screed, about what the general considered exile in Kansas. “I am, as you intimate, losing much of the great confidence I placed in you, not from any act or omission of yours touchi
ng the public service, up to the time you were sent to Leavenworth, but from the flood of grumbling despatches and letters I have seen from you since.” Hunter was grousing that other officers had more troops under them than he did; to which Lincoln responded, “You are adopting the best possible way to ruin yourself. ‘Act well your part, there all the honor lies.’ He who does something at the head of one regiment, will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred.”
Yet Hunter’s carping, and his political connections, had an effect, and eventually Lincoln gave him a larger command, nominally including the states of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Hunter proceeded to provoke Lincoln once again, this time by proclaiming the emancipation of slaves in those states.
Angered but not entirely surprised, Lincoln at once rescinded the proclamation and disavowed Hunter. “I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, proclaim and declare that the Government of the United States had no knowledge, information, or belief of an intention on the part of General Hunter to issue such a proclamation,” Lincoln said. Emancipation was no part of the administration’s agenda. “Neither General Hunter nor any other commander or person has been authorized by the government of the United States to make proclamations declaring the slaves of any state free.”
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YET THE PRESSURE on Lincoln to do something about slavery didn’t ease. If anything, it grew stronger with each month the war went on. Lincoln could assert that the war was about the Union, not about slavery, and for him it was. But everyone, including Lincoln, knew that slavery was the underlying cause of the sectional division that had produced secession and the war. He had intended to save the Union first and deal with slavery later, if at all; with this strategy floundering, he tried to reverse the order.