President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman
Page 55
“I once remarked to him”: Wilson and Davis, Herndon’s Informants, p. 499.
He had energetically and sometimes eloquently presented: Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p.205. Also included is a good articulation of the core message of the Republicans.
“He alone can do good”: Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), p. 10.
“It is necessary for the prudent man”: Ibid.
“The President’s programme”: John Maynard Keynes, Essays and Sketches in Biography (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 266–67.
“[I]t must be remembered”: N&H, 3:443.
CHAPTER THREE. ON MASTERING THE SITUATION: THE DRAMA OF SUMTER
This chapter relies more than the notes may reveal on the books most often cited on the Sumter crisis: Richard N. Current, Lincoln and the First Shot (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1963), and Kenneth M. Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950).
“The first thing that was handed to me”: T. C. Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925–33), 1:476.
“twenty thousand good and well disciplined men”: Joseph Holt and Winfield Scott to Abraham Lincoln, March 5, 1861, AL Papers.
The limitations of the available force: N&H, 4:65.
“the northern press”: U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 206.
“of a most important and unexpected character”: Holt and Scott to Lincoln, March 5, 1861, AL Papers.
“Browning, of all the trials I have had”: Note headed “July 3, 1861,” in John Nicolay file, AL Papers.
“all the troubles and anxieties of his life”: Pease and Randall, Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 1:476.
“By nine o’clock that night”: John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 29.
“was besieged from morning till night”: Washington correspondence, Cincinnati Gazette, March 21, 1861 (courtesy of Michael Burlingame).
“When Major Anderson first threw himself into Fort Sumter”: Holt and Scott to Lincoln, March 5, 1861, AL Papers.
“on reflection”: July 4, 1861, Message to Congress, CW, 4:423. The phrase “at the request of the executive” in the manuscript was replaced by “on reflection” in first proof.
“came reluctantly, but decidedly”: July 4, 1861, Message to Congress, CW, 4:424.
pungent detail about the dwindling supplies: Winfield Scott to AL, March 11, 1861, AL Papers.
“I am directed by the President”: CW, 4:280.
“Sir, I desire that an expedition”: CW, 4:301.
“That night Lincoln’s eyes”: N&H, 3:395.
“himself conceived the idea”: Orville Browning’s diary (pp. 26, 46), quoted in Current, First Shot, p. 181.
“The U.S. government has directed me”: G. V. Fox to Governor Pickens and Captain Jackson, in Robert Means Thompson and Richard Wainwright, eds., Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox: Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (New York: Naval History Society, 1920), 1:18; and also in Current, First Shot, pp. 99–100.
changed “but starving” to “and hungry”: CW, 4:425.
“your flag flying”: CW, 4:321.
“not only to keep the latter promise good”: CW, 4:425.
“The tables were now completely turned”: Charles W. Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Fort Sumter,” Journal of Southern History 3 (August 1937), p. 281.
“Sir—you will proceed directly”: The last clause in Lincoln’s message is a little awkward. Perhaps he should have broken the sentence and started over, composing a new sentence to say what was surely plain enough—that the Union would certainly feel free to “throw in” forces should the rebels attack the fort.
“But to allow the provisioning”: Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Sumter,” p. 282.
“Nor could they be sure”: Ibid.
“Biographers of Davis and historians of the Confederacy”: Current, First Shot, p. 201.
“[I]t is unnecessary, it puts us in the wrong”: Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Sumter,” p. 283, from Pleasant A. Stovall, Robert Toombs: Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage (New York: Cassell, 1892), p. 226. Toombs is further quoted as having said, “[A]t this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountains to ocean, and legions, now quiet, will swarm out and sting us to death.” Michael Burlingame will quote in his forthcoming biography a letter from a South Carolinian living in New York who wrote Davis similar good advice, with a similarly accurate prediction of the Northern response.
“Of course Lincoln was aware”: J. G. Randall and David Herbert Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (Boston: Heath, 1961), p. 175.
He had said that the principle of secession: “[W]hy may not any portion of a new confederacy…arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it. All who cherish disunion sentiments, are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this. Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new Union, as to produce harmony only?” First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, CW, 4:268.
“Under no circumstances”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 1, p. 289.
The Confederate authorities in Montgomery: Indeed, it appears from letters that Davis wrote to his commander at Fort Pickens that he may have made the decision to fire a first shot even before Robert Chew arrived in Charleston with Lincoln’s message. Historian Grady McWhiny, in “The Confederacy’s First Shot,” Civil War History 14 (1968), has brought forward exchanges Davis and Confederate secretary of war Walker had with General Braxton Bragg, Beauregard’s equivalent at Fort Pickens. A long letter written April 3, received by Bragg on April 6, explored what Bragg should do. In the most interesting sentence, Davis wrote: “There would be an advantage in so placing them that an attack by them would be a necessity, but when we are ready to relieve our territory and jurisdiction of the presence of a foreign garrison that advantage is overbalanced by other considerations.” McWhiny says that this letter “indicates that Davis was willing to start a war. He would have liked to do precisely what Ramsdell claimed Lincoln had done—maneuver the enemy into firing the first shot—but the Confederate President considered such a scheme, in his own words, ‘overbalanced by other considerations.’”
Bragg explained the practical difficulties concerning an attack on Fort Pickens; a Confederate attack was not made—a first shot in Florida—only because the general in charge judged it not to be practically sound. McWhiny writes in conclusion:
He [Davis] encouraged Bragg to capture Fort Pickens, but when Bragg insisted that the only possible way to take Pickens was by a reckless assault which might become an embarrassing failure, Davis shifted his attention to Sumter and directed Beauregard to open fire. Thus war came at Fort Sumter only because the Confederates were neither subtle enough nor strong enough to begin it at Fort Pickens.
“I have the honor to acknowledge” (April 11): OR, ser. 1, vol. 1, p. 15.
“By authority of Brigadier-General Beauregard”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 1, p. 14.
“I have the honor to acknowledge” (April 13): OR, ser. 1, vol. 1, p. 15.
“You and I both anticipated”: CW, 4:351.
“Was this statement merely intended to soothe”: Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Sumter,” p. 285.
“He himself conceived the idea”: Pease and Randall, Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 1:476.
“It completes the evidence”: Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Sumter,” p. 288.
“When he finally gave the order”: N&H, 4:62.
CHAPTER FOUR. ON NOT MASTERING THE SITUATION: THE COMEDY OF THE POWHATAN
Major participants left accounts of this episode. Much of the story can b
e found in the letters to and from Gustavus Fox in Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox: Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1861–1865, ed. Robert Means Thompson and Richard Wainwright, 2 vols. (New York: Naval History Society, 1920), 1:15–41, which prints the letters about both the Sumter and the Pickens-Powhatan expeditions, which from Fox’s point of view were woven together. Gideon Welles offers perhaps the most detailed account of the Powhatan affair. Of particular value in writing this chapter was the first volume of his Diary of Gideon Welles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), pp. 3–69. He dealt with these expeditions again in two articles he wrote almost a decade afterward: “Fort Sumter,” Galaxy 10, no. 5 (November 1870), pp. 613–28, and “Fort Pickens,” Galaxy 11, no. 1 (January 1871), pp. 92–108. John Niven’s biography, Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), was another helpful resource. Montgomery Meigs’s interpretation of the event is taken from diary excerpts that were published in “General M. C. Meigs on the Conduct of the Civil War,” American Historical Review 26, no. 2 (January 1921). Admiral Porter told his anecdotes from the Powhatan episode in a book written many years after the event: David D. Porter, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1885).
“We are at the end”: Seward to Lincoln, April 1, 1861, AL Papers.
One way to do that: Seward preceded his proposal of a foreign war with this statement of his “system”: “I am aware that my views are singular, and perhaps not sufficiently explained. My system is built upon this idea as a ruling one, namely that we must 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. The occupation or evacuation of Fort Sumter…is so regarded. Witness, the temper manifested by the Republicans in the Free States, and even by Union men in the South. I would therefore terminate it as a safe means for changing the issue. I deem it fortunate that the last Administration created the necessity.” April 1, 1861, CW, 4:317–18.
“I said ‘The power confided to me’”: CW, 4:316.
“I would call in Captain M. C. Meigs”: Seward to Lincoln, March 29, 1861, AL Papers.
“ought to see some of the younger officers”: ORN, 4:104.
When Lincoln asked Meigs: N&H, 3:395.
Seward insisted that the Pickens expedition must be kept secret: David Porter—Admiral Porter as he became—published twenty years after the war this account of the meeting with Lincoln, with suspiciously precise quotations from the participants:
When we arrived at the White House, Mr. Lincoln—who seemed to be aware of our errand—opened the conversation. “Tell me,” said he, “how we can prevent Fort Pickens from falling into the hands of the rebels…Pensacola would be a very important place for the Southerners, and if they once get possession of Pickens, and fortify it, we have no navy to take it from them.”
“Mr. President,” said I, “there is a queer state of things existing in the Navy Department at this time. Mr. Welles is surrounded by officers and clerks, some of whom are disloyal at heart, and if the orders for this expedition should emanate from the Secretary of the Navy, and pass through all the department red tape, the news would be at once flashed over the wires, and Fort Pickens would be lost for ever. But if you will issue all the orders from the Executive Mansion, and let me proceed to New York with them, I will guarantee their prompt execution to the letter.”
“But,” said the President, “is not this a most irregular mode of proceeding?”
“Certainly,” I replied, “but the necessity of the case justifies it.”
“You are commander-in-chief of the army and navy,” said Mr. Seward to the President, “and this is a case where it is necessary to issue direct orders without passing them through intermediaries.
Porter, Incidents, pp. 14–15.
“Hard at work all day”: Meigs’s diary, as cited at the head of this chapter.
The most remarkable of these letters: We learn from Welles in his Galaxy article on Fort Pickens that the body of the letter was in Meigs’s handwriting, and the long postscript was in that of David Porter. The postscript asked Welles to give Captain Barron all possible help in mastering the detail of the Navy Department. One must remember that in these days loyalties had yet to be clarified—before April 14–15 and the fall of Sumter and the call of the militia, before April 22 and the great exodus of rebels from the government. Porter’s plugging of Barron suggests that Foote was right to be wary of Porter’s moving in navy circles, where there were secessionist sentiments. Barron was a Virginian who was an influential navy man in Washington, a “navy diplomat,” who would soon join the Confederate navy. In a perfect irony, in an August 1861 encounter at Hatteras Inlet, he would be the first Confederate naval officer captured by Union forces, the naval component of which would be led by Commodore Silas Stringham. Barron would not have been a good appointment as head of the Bureau of Detail of the United States Navy.
“[R]aising his head from the table”: Welles, Diary, p. 17.
An embarrassed Lincoln told Welles: Welles’s biographer John Niven suggests that Lincoln was not altogether candid with Welles, telling him that he had not read the flurry of orders that he signed when Seward brought them to him that day (orders to Foote, Mercer, and especially Porter that set this bollixed event in motion). Niven argues that the orders are short, the longest only forty-two words, and that a trained lawyer could get the gist of them at a glance and know what he was signing. I answer that at least the document rearranging naval personnel, the one Welles would bring to him indignantly that very evening, was longer than forty-two words and not easy to “gist” even if one knew what it was all about, which Lincoln didn’t. Surely he did sign that one without comprehending it—and when he did comprehend it, he immediately repudiated it. On the other hand, can we not assume that Lincoln did know that he was setting in motion an expedition to succor Fort Pickens, signing orders rapidly to make that happen, with Meigs whom he had met and liked in the key position? It is just that he did not read the orders closely enough to register the names Powhatan and Mercer when they came around again.
“[f]it out the Powhatan”: Welles, “Fort Sumter.”
“Delay the Powhatan”: Roll 82, M625, Navy Records, National Archives.
“I am with Captain Meigs”: ORN, 4:111.
“off Charleston bar”: Simon Cameron to G. V. Fox, in Thompson and Wainwright, Confidential Correspondence, 1:23–25.
“On seeing us”: Welles, Diary, p. 24.
“Seward, tense and tired”: Niven, Welles, p. 335.
“Give the Powhatan to Mercer”: William Seward to D. D. Porter, ORN, 4:112.
“[H]eavy guns were heard”: Gustavus V. Fox to Gideon Welles, from a report regarding the expedition under his command for the relief of Fort Sumter, ORN, 4:249–50.
“I…proceeded to Fort Sumter”: John P. Gillis to Gideon Welles, ORN, 4:251–52.
“[W]hen the arrow has sped”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 1, p. 369.
“I do not think I have deserved this treatment”: G. V. Fox, in Thompson and Wainwright, Confidential Correspondence, 1:33. Fox’s report, written on April 17, with a pencil on the Baltic, is on pp. 31–36. It ends: “As for our expedition, somebody’s influence made it ridiculous.”
“Early in April 1861”: Gustavus V. Fox to John G. Nicolay, February 22, 1865, AL Papers.
Nicolay had to answer: John G. Nicolay to Gustavus V. Fox, February 24, 1865, AL Papers.
“He took upon himself”: Welles, Diary, p. 25.
“I sincerely regret”: Lincoln to G. V. Fox, ORN, 4:251.