In a stirring conclusion, Palmer argued that only independence could fulfill the South’s “providential trust”: the duty “to ourselves, to our slaves, to the world, and to Almighty God … to preserve and transmit our existing system of domestic servitude, with the right, unchallenged by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it.” The sermon stunned the congregation with its candor and eloquent justification for a reviled civilization under siege. No longer shunned prophets in their own land, they were God’s Chosen Nation. Thirty thousand copies of the sermon blanketed the South, creating “a very great sensation.” One southerner, years later, noted that Palmer had done more than “any other non-combatant in the South to promote rebellion.” Union General Benjamin F. Butler agreed, placing a bounty on Palmer’s head when his troops occupied New Orleans in 1862.31
Northerners were uncertain how to react to secession. Some uttered “good riddance”; others prayed for compromise; still others talked of coercion. If the president-elect had wanted to take the pulse of the northern public to help him determine a course of action, his findings would have been hard to interpret.
The editors of Harper’s magazine, a bellwether of moderate northern public opinion, hoped for a rapid reconciliation, less for the sake of the departing Lower South states than for the northern economy, which stood to lose cotton exports valued at more than $180 million. Harper’s solution was to allow secession to run its course and hope for a compromise to restore the Union. The editors supported almost any plan that raised that promise. They presented their own “Cornerstone” speech: “Our Government, like all other Governments,… rests upon the corner-stone of COMPROMISE—the yielding by each component part of something for the general good.” The editors were optimistic that in this advanced age something could be worked out: “It is not possible that in the present day of enlightenment, civilization, progress, and commerce these obvious truths [of the value of compromise] should be ignored.”32
Northern moderates received the selection of Davis as president of the Confederacy as an encouraging sign of reason in the new government. Alexander Stephens’s elevation to the vice presidency provided more optimism, as many northerners viewed him as “the most emphatic enemy of disunion.” The Confederate Constitution, an almost verbatim copy of the United States Constitution, generated hope that grounds for reconciliation existed. In the meantime, many northerners cautioned, “the enterprise of holding the Union together by force would ultimately prove futile.” Coercion would dash hopes for compromise and precipitate an economic debacle at a time when the financial panic of 1857–58 remained fresh in memory. Already southerners were canceling orders for northern goods; northern factories cut wages as demand dropped; and workers at several New England mills went out on strike, raising the specter of social unrest.33
Expulsion of black and white abolitionists from Tremont Temple, Boston, December 3, 1860. (Picture Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
Many abolitionists abjured compromise with the devil and rejoiced to be rid of the southern scourge. They not only agreed with moderates who dismissed coercion as an option but also argued for total disengagement. It was a curious position. Was slavery less of a sin if the South separated itself from the Union? Was abolition no longer a priority if the institution suddenly belonged to another country? Noted abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared in March 1861, “Every man who possesses his soul in patience, sees that disunion is gain, disunion is peace, disunion is virtue.” Much as secessionists perceived their action to be an atonement and a rebirth as a new and pristine nation, these advocates of letting go saw the opportunity of a reconstituted United States to at last justify its promise as a Chosen Nation, now rid of slavery and reborn cleansed of that awful sin.34
Some northern clergy supported this view, though unlike in the South, the secession crisis did not create a consensus in northern pulpits. Joseph Bittinger, an evangelical minister from Cleveland, observed, “The feeling is gaining ground [among Christians] that it would be good riddance if the South went out.… God’s people … favor … secession rather than … any more political compromise with slavery.” Some Republican politicians, recalling how southern collusion had shredded their legislative agenda in the previous Congress, now looked forward to a friendlier body. Others began to plan for life without the South, including moving the capital to a more appropriate northern location. Harper’s offered New York City as a possibility, but Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago received support as well.35
A good many northerners, especially those with close business and political ties to the South, clung to the hope of compromise even if they believed that secession was illegal and ill advised. The enthusiastic northern response to the Crittenden proposals reflected a reservoir of support for a peaceful resolution. It also indicated a willingness to bend to southern demands that heretofore many had deemed unacceptable.
While most northerners, regardless of political leaning, opposed coercion initially, a minority believed that the integrity of the Union was essential to fulfill the nation’s destiny as God’s Chosen Nation. Disunion would terminate America’s noble experiment in spreading the ideals of a progressive Christian democracy across a continent and around the world. It would throw the globe into a downward spiral of chaos. The bloody aftermath of the failed European revolutions and sectarian violence and crime at home were harbingers of the social disintegration to come.
The northerners who considered coercion a viable option believed that allowing some states to leave the compact provided other states with the precedent to do the same at some later time. For these northerners, the issue was not states’ rights—the states retained all of the rights bestowed on them by the Constitution. Secession was not one of these rights. The sacred documents were the foundations of law and order; secession, as a violation of the principles of Union articulated in these documents, threatened that stability. With that threat, the future of immutable progress and the order that supported it appeared doubtful. The Union, in other words, was a prerequisite for national greatness.
To defend the Union and the principle of law, and to avoid anarchy, Abraham Lincoln refused to rule out force as an option. Since the late 1830s he had warned against the dangers of internal dissension and the necessity of placing reason over impulse and of law over anarchy. From his reading of the Constitution, secession was illegal. The states derived their status from membership in the Union; they possessed no legal status apart from the Union. “By conquest, or purchase,” Lincoln explained, “the Union gave each of them whatever of independence and liberty it has. The Union is older than any of the States; and, in fact, it created them as States.”36
Lincoln believed that dismemberment presaged destruction. “The principle itself [of secession] is one of disintegration, and upon which no government can possibly endure.” Much as southerners feared a slave insurrection in the wake of a Republican administration, so Lincoln saw chaos as the result of disunion. “Plainly,” he argued, “the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.”37
In February 1861, as he prepared for his journey from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln’s views on compromise and secession were clear and unyielding. As he told his secretary John Nicolay, “The right of a State to secede is not an open or debatable question. It is the duty of a President to execute the laws and maintain the existing Government. He cannot entertain any proposition for dissolution or dismemberment.”38
By the time Lincoln packed for his travel eastward, however, even some of his staunchest Republican allies were exploring possible grounds for compromise. They watched the deepening economic disruption and feared the consequences of armed conflict. Colleagues urged Lincoln to make conciliatory statements to the South as a “means of strengthening our friends” there. There was talk of resurrecting Stephen A. Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine, previously a sacrilege to Republicans, as a basis for
compromise. This plan had the virtue of avoiding specific safeguards for slavery while still holding open the possibility of its extension into the territories. Whether that doctrine held any interest in the seceding states was doubtful. It might give Upper South states some pause and bolster Union sentiment there. Lincoln remained unimpressed. The president-elect urged Republicans to “stand firm. The tug has to come, and better now, than any time hereafter.”39
Abraham Lincoln departed Springfield for Washington, D.C., on February 11, 1861. He ordered his law partner, William Herndon, to keep the shingle, Lincoln & Herndon, “undisturbed” in front of their law office. “If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” He struck out on a meandering journey that lasted twelve days. Although the country’s railroad mileage was more extensive in 1861 than it had been when Lincoln left the Congress in 1849, it was less a network than a kaleidoscope of short- and long-haul companies competing for freight and passenger traffic. The president-elect had to change trains seventeen times to reach his appointed destination, doubtless reinforcing his support for a seamless transcontinental railroad.40
The route took him to Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, New York City, Trenton, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and numerous smaller places in between, before depositing him at the nation’s capital on February 23. Mostly friendly, often curious crowds greeted his appearance, except in New York City, where Walt Whitman witnessed the tense scene outside the Astor House. Lincoln had undertaken this trip less as a triumphal tour than as an opportunity to generate support for the Union and instill confidence among troubled northerners regardless of party. The purposeful rail journey afforded Lincoln a chance to meet his new constituents and vice versa. As he told a crowd at a stop in Indiana, “While some of us may differ in political opinions, still we are all united in one feeling for the Union. We all believe in the maintenance of the Union, of every star and every stripe of the glorious flag.”41
While he preached consensus to northern crowds, he offered no conciliation to the South. Some writers have argued that Lincoln did not appreciate the depth of southern animosity toward an impending Republican regime, implying that had he been aware of such sentiments he might have been more amenable to compromise. That was hardly the case. While he joshed about the innumerable southern threats of disunion prior to the election, the swift secession of the Lower South states convinced him that the crisis was real and required immediate attention. In his farewell speech to his neighbors in Springfield, he acknowledged that the challenge that awaited him was “greater than that which rested upon Washington.” He would not back away from what he saw as his constitutional duty and his love for the Union. He denied that such a position implied coercion: would it be coercion if the government “simply insists upon holding its own forts, or retaking those forts which belong to it,… or … the collection of duties upon foreign importations,… or even the withdrawal of the mails from those portions of the country where the mails themselves are habitually violated?” He quickly added that he had not yet reached a decision on these issues, but, clearly, the statement itself implied the possibility of confrontation. As he told the New Jersey legislature in Trenton, “It may be necessary to put the foot down firmly.”42
The most moving stop occurred at Philadelphia on February 22, the birthday of George Washington. The crowd at storied Independence Hall that day was decidedly friendlier than the one he had encountered in New York City. The atmosphere was still tense, however, as death threats had followed Lincoln’s train. Outside this hallowed hall, the president-elect grasped a rope and hoisted a large Star-Spangled Banner. As he pulled on the halyards the flag rose, slowly unfurling in the gentle wind, revealing the colors radiant in the brilliant sunshine. A crescendo of cheers followed the flag upward as if the ascending standard embodied the enduring strength of their beloved Union, and the hope that everything and everyone would be saved. When the flag reached the summit, a band burst into a lively rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the cannon assembled in the square boomed a deafening affirmation.
Inside the hall, Lincoln spoke of the document framed within its walls and what it meant to Americans and to people around the world. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he acknowledged. There was “something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” Even the lowly slave. It was this global vision of America offering hope to men everywhere that sustained Lincoln’s love for the Union and the Constitution upon which it rested.43
That the president-elect had to clandestinely change trains in Baltimore at three in the morning on February 23 attested both to the hostility of this slaveholding city and to the precarious nature of the crisis he was about to inherit. Washington, D.C., was also a southern city. Confederate agents, spies, slaves, and slave traders occupied various precincts even if many southern lawmakers had officially abandoned the federal government. Intrigue and rumor were the prime currencies and trading cheaply. The city landscape remained incomplete, with vast distances connected by muddy thoroughfares populated by indifferent structures punctuated here and there by a stately residence or an imposing federal building. Scaffolding covered the Capitol dome, part of a building project sixty-three years old and still counting, a symbol of how fragile the nation seemed at the moment. As one reporter noted, “If the Union is preserved, and Washington remains the Capital, a hundred years hence the original scheme may be carried out.”44
The extraordinary crisis called for extraordinary statesmanship. How the president-elect put together his cabinet provided some insight into his character and conviction. He collected some of his most bitter political rivals and critics and rewarded them with plum positions. A cynic might say he shrewdly co-opted his enemies, but these were men—Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and Secretary of State William H. Seward—who would not be readily flattered by an individual for whom they held little respect. He explained his unorthodox choices: “We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet.… I had no right to deprive the country of their service.” Though Stanton and Seward eventually warmed to the president, Chase never did. Lincoln rewarded the obstreperous Chase with a promotion to chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. All would prove exemplary in their respective roles, made infinitely more difficult by the necessities of war and reconstruction.45
The composition of his cabinet revealed that Lincoln bore no grudges against his enemies; that the interests of his country prevailed over his personal ego. Would he go that far with the South? His inaugural address on March 4, 1861, was the most important speech he had ever delivered. With the Union hanging in the balance, a new nation already up and running hard on its borders, a brace of compromises fallen by the wayside, and Unionist sentiment becoming ever more precarious in the remaining slave states, he stepped to the podium at the East Portico of the Capitol on a cool, clear March day to take his oath of office from none other than Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. Stephen A. Douglas sat in the front row. He was holding the president-elect’s hat. A fractured nation and many parts of the world waited anxiously for Lincoln’s words.
Preparing his address, Lincoln studied three texts: Andrew Jackson’s proclamation against Nullification and the speeches of the two greatest Whig luminaries, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. From Clay, Lincoln chose his speech on behalf of the Compromise of 1850, and from Webster, his renowned speech against Nullification in 1830, a speech he had committed to memory and had used numerous times in the past.
Lincoln’s inaugural address was not a great speech, especially compared with his earlier and later orations, though such comparis
ons may be unfair. It was a walking-on-eggshells speech balancing his own conviction of the sanctity and destiny of the federal Union with the nation’s desire to resolve the current crisis peacefully.
He tried to address southern fears by reiterating what he had said in countless speeches prior to 1861: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He also pledged to uphold the Fugitive Slave Law. Much of the remainder of the speech took the form of a detailed legal brief denying the constitutionality of secession and coupling this denial with a vow to uphold his oath “to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government.” Once again, he equated secession with “anarchy.” While the government was protective of minority rights, majority rule must prevail. “The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.” Time and again, Lincoln reminded listeners of his constitutional duty, “the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’” the government and the country. Lincoln closed with the only stirring lines of the day, urging southerners to abandon “passion” and “think calmly and well upon the whole subject,” so that “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union.”46
None of this left southerners, in or out of the Confederacy, with the warm feeling of conciliation. Lincoln’s eloquent appeal to a common past only provided southerners with a painful reminder of their current diminished position in the Union compared with their formative role in the nation’s founding. The new president’s evocation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence did not resonate among a people schooled to doubt that those documents protected them and their institutions. Southerners did not need a history lesson; they required ironclad guarantees and explicitly conciliatory rhetoric. They got neither.
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