Instead of acquiescing in the order clearly indicated in the papers before him and given by the most eminent advice, Lincoln, before retiring after his first full day in the executive mansion, directed General Scott to study the Fort Sumter matter more fully and, in addition, to take the steps necessary to “hold, occupy, and possess” other places still in Union hands—which had to mean Fort Pickens in Florida.
IT WOULD BE OUR NATIONAL DESTRUCTION CONSUMMATED
WHEN A WEEK LATER General Scott, supported by “other officers both of the army and of the navy,” and in answer to written questions from this new president, “came reluctantly, but decidedly, to the same conclusion as before,” Lincoln in response also came to the same conclusion as before. The aging, portly, but enormously respected Scott gave pungent detail about the dwindling supplies for the U.S. garrison in Sumter, the impossible odds they faced (fewer than one hundred men, surrounded by 3,500 South Carolina troops with guns and mortars of large caliber), and the utterly impossible requirements for a successful U.S. supply and reinforcement: “A fleet of war vessels and transports, 5,000 additional regular troops and 20,000 volunteers…to raise, organize and discipline such an army would require new acts of congress and from six to eight months.”
So the conclusion was unavoidable. The garrison, even if it were not attacked, could not hold out for two months, and assembling a force sufficient to reinforce the fort would take at least six months; therefore what the president had to do was order the garrison to evacuate the fort. General Scott even went so far as to submit to the president an already drafted letter to be sent to Major Anderson, ordering him to evacuate the fort. Most of Lincoln’s cabinet supported such a course; Secretary Seward was strongly in favor of it. The New York Times reported that the cabinet on March 11 met at eleven in the morning and decided to withdraw the troops from “Fort Sumpter.” (The Times followed Lincoln’s persistent misspelling.)
All it would have taken at that moment—one week into Lincoln’s presidency—was his acceptance of that letter already composed by the most respected of military advisers; and when Anderson received the order and notified General P. G. T. Beauregard in Charleston Harbor that he was evacuating the fort, the chivalrous South Carolinians would have allowed the Union troops to have a little ceremony, lower the American flag, and withdraw with dignity.
Lincoln certainly could have had a strong political cover for doing that: blame Buchanan. It is not unknown in the history of this republic for a president to cast blame backward toward his predecessor, especially if there has been a change of party with the change of presidents. No president ever had richer material for such a gambit than Abraham Lincoln. He could have said that the Buchanan administration had allowed the situation at Sumter to come to this desperate necessity. That interpretation would have had the most potent witness in General Scott, whose every comment had lamented the missed opportunities of the recent past that now created the necessity to surrender Sumter. And he would have had a supporter in Secretary Seward.
But Lincoln did not indicate that Buchanan had left him in this tight situation, true as that certainly was. Instead, he grappled with what to do about Sumter in the terms that the issue came to him.
Again Lincoln made a mammoth decision. He did not permit Scott’s letter to Anderson to be sent. Moreover, he had his secretary John Nicolay put in writing the message he had given to his military chief orally on the first day: “I am directed by the President to say that he desires you to exercise all vigilance for the maintenance of all the places within the military department of the United States.”
On March 13 Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, the one cabinet member who opposed giving up Sumter, introduced Lincoln to his brother-in-law Gustavus V. Fox. Fox, thirty-nine years old, was an energetic Annapolis graduate and naval officer who disagreed with Scott and the others and believed that relief could be provided to Fort Sumter, which was what Lincoln wanted to hear. Fox at first proposed a naval barrage to clear the way, to be followed by a nighttime supply, by means of small New York tugboats making their way to the fort under the cover of darkness. Army officers believed it would not work; navy men thought it might. There was an intense flow of discussions, suggestions, cabinet meetings, and military consultations about Fox’s proposal. In the days that followed Lincoln sent three visitors, or scouts, down to Charleston, one of them Fox.
ON MARCH 28 Lincoln told Fox to make a list of the ships, men, and equipment he would need for his expedition. That evening the Lincoln administration held its first state dinner. The president seemed in good humor but drew the cabinet aside afterward to share a disturbing memorandum from General Scott, in which he now recommended, for the soothing of the South and the border states, abandoning not only Fort Sumter but also the other major southern fort still in Union hands, Fort Pickens in Pensacola. The cabinet, except perhaps for Seward, was stunned at this proposed double capitulation; Lincoln asked them to come the next day for a regular cabinet meeting.
After the cabinet meeting on March 29, Lincoln began to function actively in the quite extraordinary role that the Constitution-makers had specified for the elected head of the American federal government, “Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” Up to this point in those crowded days of huge decisions, his action had consisted of issuing some quite general instructions and then of responding, negatively, to the recommendations that the nation’s military had given—three times—that he order the evacuation of the fort. Now Lincoln took the initiative to set in motion by his orders a large military undertaking. He wrote at the bottom of Captain Fox’s specification of ships and men and supplies and equipment this presidential command to the secretary of war: “Sir, I desire that an expedition, to move by sea, be got ready to sail as early as the 6th of April next, the whole according to the memorandum attached, and that you cooperate with the Secretary of the Navy for that object.” Lincoln said that this expedition was “intended to be ultimately used or not according to circumstances.” Lincoln ordered Fox to go to New York to supervise preparations.
MEANWHILE, WHAT ABOUT that other fort, Fort Pickens in Florida? Lincoln’s moral commitment in his inaugural, and his orders to Scott both orally on his first day and in writing a week later, specified holding all federal facilities still in the government’s control, which included Pickens as well as Sumter. But the reinforcement of Fort Pickens, as we will see in the next chapter, had not happened. On this extremely busy day Seward, foiled in his effort to prevent a Sumter expedition, called on Lincoln with a proposed expedition to Fort Pickens, and Lincoln began the planning for that one also.
SO NOW, after twenty-five days as president, as segments of the Northern press and public became increasingly eager for action, Lincoln began to set in motion not one but two hugely significant military expeditions to vindicate the Union. Nicolay and Hay, living in the White House at the time, described the Friday night after these decisions:
That night Lincoln’s eyes did not close in sleep. It was apparent that the time had come when he must meet the nation’s crisis. His judgment alone must guide, his sole will determine, his own lips utter the word that should save or lose the most precious inheritance of humanity, the last hope of free government on earth. Only the imagination may picture that intense and weary vigil.
On the afternoon of April 4 Gustavus Fox met with President Lincoln and Navy Secretary Gideon Welles to clinch the arrangements for an expedition to Fort Sumter. When Fox stressed the need for a naval armament, Secretary Welles added the powerful war steamer Powhatan, with three hundred sailors, to the flotilla.
On that same day Lincoln wrote out a message to Major Anderson, telling him not as he had expected, and no doubt hoped, that he was ordered to evacuate, but instead to hold out if possible until the eleventh or twelfth, when a relief expedition would arrive. Lincoln sent this message to Anderson by mail on April 4 and repeated it by messenger on April 6.
Fox returned to New York and subse
quently dispatched his flotilla. The plan was for the ships to rendezvous ten miles off Charleston Harbor on April 12.
WHY DID THIS NEW PRESIDENT, in his first hours in office, defy all the expert advice he had been given? Because he was not only commander of the military force but leader of the nation. Because he saw the issue in its largest dimension, that of the nation’s survival. His explanation of this decision demonstrated his awareness of the huge political stakes, far beyond military considerations, that lay in these events. In his summary of events in his July 4 Message, Lincoln wrote, “In a purely military point of view this [the response to his questions by General Winfield Scott and his military advisers] reduced the duty of the administration to the mere matter of getting the garrison safely out of the Fort.” But he saw the issue as vastly more than military.
Lincoln’s statements of the nonmilitary consequences—the moral-political consequences, we may say—were couched in the most stark, conclusive language. “The executive believed,” he wrote in his draft (he would change that to “it was believed”), “that to abandon that position would be utterly ruinous…that, in fact, it would be our national destruction consummated.” His conclusion was unequivocal, a line in the sand: “This could not be allowed.” He gave three reasons why a voluntary Union evacuation of Sumter, not seen to be done under necessity, would consummate our national destruction: it “would discourage friends of the Union, embolden its adversaries, and go far to insure the latter a recognition abroad.”
He showed an independent grip on high purpose, and a strength of will, that he would have abundant occasion to display in the events that would now follow. He would even have occasion shortly to make reference to the great Democratic symbol of presidential strength Andrew Jackson. But Lincoln would exhibit something more. His hero was not Jackson but Henry Clay. He had given a eulogy when Clay died in 1852, and what we choose to praise in someone else can be revealing. Lincoln said that Clay had an “indomitable will” and, in addition, good judgment. Without good judgment, Lincoln said, an indomitable will can be “nothing better than useless obstinacy.”
Lincoln would also show, as these crushing days wore on, an unusual element of strategic imagination. While he was repeatedly deciding not to abandon Sumter, he was also beginning to see a way to meet the demands of his situation.
GIVING BREAD TO HUNGRY MEN
AT SOME POINT in the last two weeks of March, amid the discussion with Fox about his expedition and the exchanges with Anderson and others about the rapidly diminishing supply of hard bread, flour, rice, and salt meat in the fort, Lincoln had a masterful idea. It would be a way to signify the Union’s intention to “hold” and “possess” this most important government property and at the same time to keep his promise not to initiate conflict, not to be the aggressor. The strategy had two parts, inextricably connected: send provisions only, and notify the South Carolinians.
The first part of the idea was to separate food from armament. The garrison needed bread—so Washington would send bread only, no arms. Orville Browning would write in his diary that Lincoln had told him that he “himself conceived the idea” of sending supplies “without an attempt to reinforce.”
Lincoln would emphasize, underline, and insist that the provisions that he proposed to send were food, not arms. He took the following steps:
• In the letter dated April 6, 1861, notifying Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina, Lincoln (who wrote all these key messages himself) had his messenger Robert Chew say: “I am directed by the President of the United States to notify you to expect an attempt will be made to supply Fort-Sumpter with provisions only.”*13
• Lincoln had Fox instruct the first boat’s pilot to deliver to any person opposing his entrance into Fort Sumter a further letter to be taken to Governor Pickens. This letter would emphasize the predicament in which he had placed the Confederates. It read: “The U.S. government has directed me [the pilot of the boat] to deliver a quantity of provisions to Major Anderson at Fort Sumpter…Accordingly I send here with the first load. If your batteries open fire it will be upon an unarmed boat, and unarmed men performing an act of duty and humanity.” (This emphasis, making the point doubly clear, is in the original, from Lincoln’s own hand.)
• In the draft of his July 4 Message to Congress, Lincoln, summarizing these events, wrote that “the giving of bread to the few brave but starving men of the garrison, was all which would be attempted.” On second thought, editing his draft, he apparently decided that “starving” might be overdoing it, so he changed “but starving” to “and hungry.”
Lincoln wanted the world to know that this expedition brought bread; firing on it would be “firing on bread.”
To be sure, from a rebel’s point of view, bread was as bad as arms; either or both would sustain, or would indicate an intention to sustain, the objectionable occupying garrison and the objectionable flag in Charleston Harbor. But the rest of the world—including much of the wavering Upper South—would surely accept the distinction. Lincoln had skillfully hit a symbolic point: sending bread to hungry men was not “aggression” or “coercion” or “invasion.”
AS THE BREAD-BRINGING EXPEDITION was leaving for Fort Sumter, a new message came from Major Anderson, indicating that the men might indeed be hungry; supplies in Fort Sumter were even shorter than had been thought in Washington. Lincoln drafted in his own hand a letter for Secretary of War Simon Cameron to sign, telling Anderson once again to hold out, if he could, until the eleventh or twelfth, when the expedition should arrive. If the expedition should find “your flag flying,” it will attempt to provision you and, “in case the effort is resisted, also to re-inforce you.” But, Lincoln wrote, if a capitulation became necessary to save himself and his command, Anderson was authorized to make it.
THE OTHER ELEMENT of Lincoln’s plan was to notify the Confederates. Fox had proposed to send the smaller boats with provisions to Sumter surreptitiously, at night. For Lincoln, however, it was of central importance that the effort be quite open, with the governor of South Carolina notified ahead of time.
On April 6 Lincoln sent a State Department clerk named Robert S. Chew as messenger to Charleston to obtain an audience with the governor. It is significant that Lincoln sent this notification to Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina, a legitimate official, a governor of one of the states, and not to the “illegal organization, in the character of Confederate states,” in Montgomery.
Chew set out for Charleston with a companion named Theodore Talbot, an army captain who had just made the trip the other way, bringing a message from Major Anderson. Captain Talbot was now turned around and sent back to Sumter with Lincoln’s message to Anderson—hold out until the twelfth if you can—that had already been sent by mail. Talbot had the original, in Lincoln’s own handwriting. The two messengers arrived in Charleston on April 8. Talbot, whom the rebels already had met, was permitted to see Governor Pickens and asked him to receive Robert Chew, an emissary from the president of the United States, and the governor agreed. Chew then read to him, and gave him a copy of, Lincoln’s “provisions only” message. The governor invited into the room General Beauregard, in charge of the rebel forces in Charleston Harbor, and read him Lincoln’s message: provisions only, no arms unless you fire. Beauregard refused to let Talbot carry the message to Anderson out at the fort, so Chew and Talbot returned together and, after delays, reached Washington and reported to Lincoln and the cabinet on an important date—April 12.
This open notification about the expedition was a masterstroke by Lincoln, part of the unified Sumter masterstroke. Even an expedition with provisions only, if delivered by night with stealth, would not have been interpreted by the world in the benign light that Lincoln wanted. But doing it openly, with notification, made the difference. It put the issue squarely to the rebels. A last-minute notice, a notice too late for action or forcing hasty decision, would have destroyed his purpose: to let the rebels—and the world—know what he was doing and t
o let them decide.
DID LINCOLN’S LETTER CONTAIN A THREAT?
IN FINDING THE WAY to fulfill his two obligations—to hold U.S. property while not initiating conflict—Lincoln “took pains,” as he himself described his eventual decision, “not only to keep the latter promise good, but also to keep the case so free from the power of ingenious sophistry, as that the world should not be able to misunderstand it.”
Notwithstanding his scrupulous care in this regard, there has been some “ingenious sophistry.” Critics have made the morally tinged charge that Lincoln deviously tricked the rebels into firing the first shot so that they could be blamed therefore for beginning the war. Both Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens would write versions of that self-justifying Confederate position. The scholarly version of that view would be presented in an oft-quoted article by historian Charles Ramsdell in 1937.
Before he criticizes Lincoln’s action, Ramsdell gives a summary that might be read as praise:
The tables were now completely turned on the Southerners. Lincoln was well out of his dilemma when they, who had heretofore had the tactical advantage of being able to wait until Anderson must evacuate, were suddenly faced with a choice of two evils. They must either take the fort before relief could arrive, thus taking the apparent offensive which they had hoped to avoid, or they must stand by quietly and see the fort provisioned…This, then, was the dilemma which they faced as the result of Lincoln’s astute strategy.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 8
