President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  Western Maryland was largely Unionist; secession support was concentrated in the tobacco country of the Eastern Shore and southern Maryland; Baltimore, the third largest city in the nation in 1860, held the balance. Baltimore was a great railroad city, not only the anchor of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad but the site of great railroad shops and industries. It was not a slaveholding center: “In 1860, slaves accounted for only 1% of 212,418 Baltimoreans. Free blacks outnumbered enslaved blacks eleven to one, and foreign immigrants outnumbered blacks two to one.” Baltimore was more of an East Coast industrial city than a Southern slaveholding center, and it had nativist-immigrant rumblings that were more characteristic of the former than the latter. The opposition to Yankee invaders came not only from secessionists but from nativists and Irish immigrants; when the invasions ceased, Baltimore went back to trading with the North. Another contingent of Massachusetts troops under General Benjamin Butler, arriving by sea, occupied Annapolis, which was not only a landing point for troops getting to Washington without provoking Baltimore but also the state capital. The governor of Maryland, Thomas Hicks, unlike the governors of Kentucky and Missouri, was on balance, although a little shakily, a supporter of the Union. He called the legislature into session to consider the question of secession. Since the state capital, Annapolis, was occupied by Union troops and simmering Baltimore did not seem like a good alternative location, he summoned the legislature to assemble in a special session on April 26 out in safer western Maryland, at Frederick.

  Certainly some secessionist noises accompanied the session. The forthright General Butler—soon to be called “The Beast,” according to John Hay’s diary—“sent an imploring request to the President to be allowed to bag the whole nest of traitorous Maryland legislators and bring them in triumph here.” Lincoln, as is not surprising, did not adopt Butler’s proposal, or any other proposal to intervene immediately, at this early stage, in the doings of the Maryland legislature. He wrote to General Scott:

  The question has been submitted to…me, whether it would not be justifiable, upon the ground of necessary defence, for you, as commander in Chief of the United States Army, to arrest, or disperse the members of that body. I think it would not be justifiable; nor, efficient for the desired object.

  First, they have a clearly legal right to assemble; and, we can not know in advance, that their action will not be lawful, and peaceful. And if we wait until they shall have acted, their arrest, or dispersion, will not lessen the effect of their action.

  Secondly, we can not permanently prevent their action. If we arrest them, we can not long hold them as prisoners; and when liberated, they will immediately reassemble, and take their action. And, precisely the same if we simply disperse them. They will immediately re-assemble in some other place.

  I therefore conclude that it is only left to the commanding General to watch and await their action.

  Watchful waiting was the better course. But that was not the end of Lincoln’s letter. He went on to say that if the action of the Maryland legislature turned out to be “to arm their people against the United States,” then General Scott should consider himself instructed “to adopt the most prompt, and efficient means to counteract” that hostile move, even to the point of “the suspension of habeas corpus” and, in extreme necessity, “the bombardment of their cities.”*20

  The bombardment of their cities? What did Lincoln have in mind? Until the last line this order was an epitome of Lincoln’s policy: as much forbearance as could be to allow the putative adversary to fire the first shot if he would; forceful immediate (“prompt, and efficient”) countermeasures if he did fire. But then “bombardment of their cities” (bombing Baltimore?) sounds like something Lincoln wrote in a careless moment.

  Maryland’s legislators had their meeting in Frederick, with General Scott watching and waiting, and the legislators did not do anything that triggered bombardment. “They called Benjamin Butler a Beast. They proclaimed Lincoln a despot. They termed federal coercion a monster. But they raised no army. They called no secession convention. They fired nothing but insults at Abraham Lincoln.” And he did not fire even insults back at them.

  They sent a committee to tell Lincoln that they would not make any immediate effort at resistance or secession and to ask that “the state…be spared the evils of a military occupation or a revengeful chastisement for former transgressions.”

  Lincoln did not know how the events in Maryland would play out, and he was a novice president in the early stages of learning how to conduct himself; he could not promise to spare them something that would look very much like a military occupation, but when the committee mentioned “revengeful chastisement,” it touched on a theme on which he knew his mind: he was not going to engage in anything like “revengeful chastisement.” He told the Maryland committee that the public interest, and not any spirit of revenge, would determine his measures.

  THE STATE OF MARYLAND managed to extract from a poem written in response to these early Civil War excitements an astonishingly belligerent anti-Union state song. The first stanza refers to “the despot’s heel,” the despot presumably being Lincoln, and includes the memorably gruesome phrase “patriotic gore” (which Edmund Wilson would lift to visibility as the title of his twentieth-century Civil War book).

  The despot’s heel is on thy shore,

  Maryland!

  His torch is at thy temple door,

  Maryland!

  Avenge the patriotic gore

  That flecked the streets of Baltimore

  And be the battle queen of yore,

  Maryland! My Maryland!

  Later stanzas call on Marylanders to “burst the tyrant’s chain,” and they claim of proud Maryland:

  She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb—

  Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!

  The poem was written in the excessive excitement following the Baltimore riots by a Marylander teaching in Louisiana. The subsequent Civil War politics of Maryland did not, generally speaking, follow the fervent exhortations in that song. Marylanders traded and had other dealings with the “Northern scum” more than with her proud sisters to the South.

  Lincoln’s actions needed firmness with forbearance. He authorized General Scott or his officers to suspend habeas corpus along the railroad line supplying troops from Philadelphia to Washington, an action that brought a counterorder from Chief Justice Taney and eventually a famous court case. Northern troops moved into the state, first to protect the passage of troops to Washington, then to fortify Baltimore itself.

  After the Confederate victory at Bull Run, an invigorated secessionist impulse in Maryland would lead to the planning of another session of the Maryland legislature, scheduled to meet on September 17, again in Frederick, and it was rumored that the gathering’s secret purpose was to vote secession. These rumors mentioned intelligence that the government had allegedly received, saying that the “secesh members of the Maryland legislature” intended to hold a “secret, extra, and illegal” session to vote secession and that simultaneously there would be a Confederate invasion of Maryland and an insurrection in Baltimore. This time there was no “watch and wait” order from the commander in chief, and some secessionist legislators were arrested by Union army authorities.

  Who set in motion this arrest of Maryland legislators? General George McClellan was certainly a central figure. In West Virginia in the summer he had provided the Union its badly needed first victories, and he had thereupon been brought east, loaded with prestige, to command the Army of the Potomac. On September 11 he sent to his nominal immediate civilian boss Secretary Cameron an already drafted order—all Cameron had to do was sign it—that instructed General John Dix to arrest six persons, named, who were known secessionists, including new Baltimore members of the legislature. Cameron did as he was asked.*21

  What was Lincoln’s role in this second encounter with the Maryland legislature? Before the arrests, writing to General Banks on September 12, McClellan began: �
�Gen’l: After full consultation with the president, secretaries of state, war, etc., it has been decided to effect the operation prepared for the 17th.” To include the president on a list, along with all these other civilians, and then add “etc.” is a particularly nice Little Mac touch—an expression of vanity and disdain like others sprinkled throughout McClellan’s papers. Neither of McClellan’s later accounts makes any mention of Lincoln. McClellan in all his references to this episode unequivocally defended it in detail, which increases one’s sense that he had the major role.

  Although McClellan orchestrated the arrests, the ultimate responsibility for making them rested with the president of the United States. It helped, in defending the arrests, that the two key figures—General McClellan and General Dix, who carried out the arrests in Baltimore—were known to be Democrats and publicly claimed military necessity. Maryland’s governor Thomas Hicks approved of the arrests.

  The preponderance of Union sentiment in Maryland was showing itself in elections, in enlistments in the two armies, and in the response of the public to events. The elections of November 1861 chose a new general assembly, eleven senators, various local officials, and a governor. The Union army was present in the state, sometimes at the polls, but, according to a key scholar, “the activities of the army were remarkably restrained and curiously dissociated from partisan politics.” The army was unconcerned enough about the election to release a group of the “graduates of Fort McHenry” (as some of the arrested legislators called themselves) just before the election. Although Governor Hicks thought this was not a good idea, Union candidates carried the elections handily; the new governor was a patriotic Unionist, an ex-Whig brought back into politics after having retired.

  Marylanders did not continue guerrilla resistance to Union troops, nor burn more bridges, nor rise up when General Lee’s army marched into the state. They joined the Union army in twice as great numbers as the Confederate. Henceforth Maryland was securely in the Union, the “first of the redeemed,” as Lincoln had predicted. Lincoln would be able to claim, in his 1861 annual message:

  Maryland was made to seem against the Union. Our soldiers were assaulted, bridges were burned, and railroads torn up, within her limits; and we were many days, at one time, without the ability to bring a single regiment over her soil to the capital. Now, her bridges and railroads are repaired and open to the government; she already gives seven regiments to the cause of the Union and none to the enemy; and her people, at a regular election, have sustained the Union, by a larger majority, and a larger aggregate vote than they ever before gave to any candidate, or any question.

  Lincoln’s forbearance in the first place and acquiescence in the arrests in the second helped to bring Maryland by the end of 1861 securely to the side of the Union, where the sympathies and connections of the larger number of her citizens, given time to think, would be found.

  WHICH VIRGINIA, OR WHO SECEDES FROM WHOM?

  THAT FIERCE MARYLAND POEM “Maryland, My Maryland” included among its fervent appeals:

  Virginia should not call in vain,

  Maryland!

  She meets her sisters in the plain—

  “Sic semper!” ’tis the proud refrain.*22

  But a Maryland novelist pointedly asked about these appeals to join Virginia: “Which Virginia?”

  Lincoln, looking at the map and the numbers, would see the crucial importance not only of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri but also of the essential link provided by the trans-Allegheny section of Virginia, the mountainous region that joined Maryland to Kentucky, that pointed a dagger up the Ohio River, and that included crucial links in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. One way or another Lincoln knew the Union had to control western Virginia.

  The state of Virginia, when Lincoln was inaugurated, covered an unwieldy expanse of territory, from the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean all the way over to the Ohio River, chopped in two by the Allegheny Mountains.†23 In the east it had a long history, an intimate association with the nation’s beginnings, great plantations, lofty family pride, aristocratic pretension, property owners with enough property to vote, Episcopalians who used to be Anglicans, tobacco, cotton—and slavery. In the west it had mountains, valleys, a much shorter history, pioneers, evangelicals, hunters, miners, lumbermen, propertyless citizens who could not vote, and the beginnings of industry. East Virginia in 1860 had 472,494 slaves; West Virginia had only 18,571. The arrogance that slavery bred bisected the state. The eastern portion had wealth, history, population, and power and shaped state policy to its own advantage in tax policy, in the apportionment of legislative seats, and in “internal improvements.” The mountain counties and beyond were treated not as an integral part of the state but as a province, and their residents perceived that they were disdained. Western Virginia felt itself under a “despot’s heel,” but the despot was not Lincoln or the Union or the North but Tidewater Virginia.

  The far northern and western counties of this huge old Virginia reached over and up into the Midwest. A sliver of a panhandle reached up between Ohio and Pennsylvania, farther north than Columbus, as far north as Pittsburgh. Wheeling, a river city far from any plantations, was only 60 miles from Pittsburgh but 330 miles from Richmond. When the news came on April 14 that Fort Sumter had fallen, and on April 15 that Lincoln had called for troops, while Virginia governor John Letcher way over in Richmond was indignantly refusing to send any troops to “subjugate the southern states,” the “Virginians” in the counties farthest north and west were asking where they could sign up to do just that. They were responding as did their nearby neighbors in Ohio and Pennsylvania: they displayed the American flag, marched in parades, held mass meetings supporting the Union, and tried to volunteer to fight for the Union. Unable to fight for the Union under their own state’s banner, northwestern Virginians enlisted in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

  At the secret secession convention in Richmond on April 17, 1861, the overwhelming majority of the delegates from the Tidewater and the Piedmont—that is, from east of the mountains, old Virginia—voted in favor of secession, while the majority of the delegates from west of the mountains voted against secession. One western Virginia delegate offered a resolution that illustrated yet again Lincoln’s description of the endlessly fissiparous effect of the principle of secession: “The right of revolution can be exercised as well by a portion of the citizens of a state against their state government, as it can be exercised by the people of the state against the federal government.” In other words, the minute that secession was proposed, westerners immediately thought of a secession from that secession.

  The Union’s rescue of these western counties of Virginia would not have come about without military force. Major General George McClellan, with superior force and help from the locals who knew the territory, defeated rebels in two early battles in July, clearing northwestern Virginia of Confederate forces. Although the numbers involved in the western Virginia battles were small, they were the first victories the Union could celebrate, they made McClellan a hero, and they led to the political actions that created a new Union-supporting free state.

  On June 20 a convention meeting in Wheeling called the Richmond traitors illegal, formed “the restored government of Virginia,” declared all offices vacant, and then unanimously chose Francis Pierpont as governor of Virginia—restored Virginia. A rump legislature from the northwestern counties chose new U.S. senators from “restored” Virginia, replacing noted secessionists who had resigned from the Senate. After a brief bout of throat clearing and eye rolling, the U.S. Senate seated the new senators.

  Lincoln felt that the U.S. government was bound to recognize and protect, as the government of Virginia, not the traitors in Richmond but these loyal citizens who had organized a loyal government in the counties over the mountains. When in July 1861 the newly elected governor wrote to President Lincoln asking for support, he received a positive response addressed to “Francis H. Pierpont, Governor of Virginia.” (The governor in
his letter to Lincoln spelled his last name “Peirpoint.” Lincoln, responding, spelled it “Pierpoint.”)

  Lincoln instructed the secretary of war to provide arms for whatever troops the restored government could raise to support the Union. “This government is bound to recognize and protect those loyal citizens,” Lincoln said (meaning Pierpont and his “restored” government), “as being Virginia.” In the draft of his message he had made it even starker: “those citizens are Virginia.”

  Governor Letcher in Richmond had disdainfully rejected Lincoln’s call for militia and had supported hostile military action against the U.S. government; Governor Pierpont in Wheeling was in full support of that government and by the end of 1861 had raised many more troops to fight for the Union than was the quota for the whole state.

  For Lincoln’s purposes, Union military control and a loyal government-in-exile was all that he needed. But the Virginia mountaineers had something more in mind. Union military control enabled a referendum on a new state to proceed; the new state was overwhelmingly supported by those who voted, who also elected delegates to a constitutional convention that produced a constitution for a new state now called West Virginia. (The proposed state’s name in the earlier round had been “Kanawha.”) This constitution was embraced by the people of the counties included, again by an overwhelming vote.