by Conrad Black
The fragments of the continuing Whigs and the American Party (Know-Nothings) had met at Baltimore in May, constituted themselves as the Constitutional Union Party, dedicated to cooling slavery out by simply preserving the Union however the Supreme Court construed the Constitution as shaping it, and nominated former Tennessee senator and Harrison’s war secretary, John Bell, for president, and Webster disciple and former secretary of state Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice president. It was a wishful conjuration of an easy exit from the relentless and suffocating crisis.
Lincoln was instrumental in having Chicago chosen, for the first of scores of national conventions, as the place of the Republican convention in May. Lincoln largely packed the site, a new convention center nicknamed “the Wigwam,” with supporters, and had the advantage of having been less militant in his comments than Seward and the other principal candidate, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. It was clear that there would be two Democratic candidates running against the Republican nominee, whose victory should thus be assured. Given the disposition of electoral votes, all the Republicans had to do was win the northern states and they would win the election, albeit with a minority of votes, as Buchanan had had opposite Frémont and Fillmore in 1856, and Taylor against Cass and Van Buren in 1848. To ensure that the party did well in the border states, and try to soften the antagonism of the southern secessionists, Lincoln was the best of the candidates. He also had the appeal of the self-made man, and of being his own man. Though born in a log cabin in Kentucky and an autodidact, Lincoln had built up one of the largest legal practices in the United States.
Seward had fought his anti-slavery corner well for a long time, and had been instrumental in uprooting the Van Buren–Marcy Albany Regency in New York. But Seward owed most of his career, and relied for most of the advice he followed on Thurlow Weed. Lincoln counseled himself. Seward had given some important addresses, including one famed for the identification, in 1858, of “an irrepressible conflict,” but Lincoln had traveled tirelessly through the northern states, had met and established a rapport with most of the prominent Republicans, and by his series of brilliant, thoughtful, powerfully delivered speeches, had made himself conspicuously presidential.
Suddenly this new party, in the most dire circumstances the country had known since Valley Forge, was going to win, and what was needed was a thoughtful, strong, steady, profound leader. Chase had no campaign manager and had no idea of how to organize a campaign. Edward Bates, a prominent ex-Whig from Missouri, was the fourth candidate, but his campaign had largely been created by the publisher of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, in an act of vengeance against his former allies, Seward and Weed. These were substantial men, but they had never spoken of the immense crisis that loomed as Lincoln had, stirring audiences to their depths again and again with speeches like those in Illinois that had shaken the Democrats apart, and at Cooper Union.
The Republican Party had been organized mostly by its leaders in the principal northern states—Weed, Seward, and Greeley in New York, Chase in Ohio, Simon Cameron in Pennsylvania, and Lincoln in Illinois. Lincoln had been the soul of diplomacy and had no enemies, and had made himself friendlier with the other party barons than they were with each other; Seward and Weed had not even called upon Pennsylvania’s Cameron, a kingmaker and favorite son from a very important state. And Lincoln had been the most articulate, frequently heard, and overpoweringly but unaffectedly eloquent evocator and voice of the ambitions and grievances of the opponents of the long and now rather sleazy Democratic confidence trick that tied slavery to Union. He was very well organized, including having altered rail schedules to bring tens of thousands of supporters from all over Illinois to Chicago in convention week.
Chicago had grown in less than 30 years from a fur and military post with barely 20 families, and wolves roaming the dirt streets at night, to a city of over 100,000 and the greatest grain, meat, and lumber market in the world; it was the breastplate of the mighty expansion across the continent of the United States. One of the principal trains bringing delegates and press from New York made the trip from Buffalo to Chicago in the astounding time of 16 hours,85 frequently exceeding 60 miles an hour. The very progress of America and its explosive growth were mocked by the antiquarian primitiveness of the South.
On the first ballot, Seward led, 173½to Lincoln’s 102, 49 for Chase, and 48 for Bates; it was a Seward-Lincoln race. On the second ballot 188 for Seward to 183½for Lincoln, and on the third ballot Lincoln came in at 231½, where only 233 was needed for a majority. A landslide of shifted votes put him across. In recognition of New England, Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was chosen as vice presidential nominee. It had been, and still stands as, one of the most brilliant campaigns for a party nomination in American history. The party platform included all the old baubles of Clay’s American System—the protective tariff for industry, liberal immigration, internal improvements, the Wilmot Proviso, an absolute prohibition of slavery in the territories, though new states were free to choose slavery—and it advocated a homestead law and a railway to the Pacific. America was to quell internal discordance and drive on to its promised greatness, inspiring and attracting the masses of oppressed Europe.
Republican victory was virtually a foregone conclusion; so was insurrection, and so, as Lincoln had warned, was war, and it would not be a slapstick war like much of what went on in previous wars with Indians, Mexicans, and even, at times, the French and the British. A terrible and total war impended, for the soul and integrity of America, to unbind it and attach it inexorably to an exalted and exceptional destiny, which it had long claimed for itself, or to cut it down to a humbled and truncated vision of itself, no longer master of the hemisphere, a heavily compromised success. The eyes of the world, which had never left America for long since Lexington and Concord, were riveted on her more fixedly than ever.
On November 6, 1860, Lincoln won 1.87 million votes (almost 40 percent), to 1.36 million (about 29 percent) for Douglas, 850,000 for Breckinridge (18 percent), and 590,000 for Bell (13 percent). Lincoln ran very strongly at nearly 40 percent in a four-way race, as was shown by his 180 electoral votes to 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell, and just 12 for Douglas. Lincoln carried all 18 free states and no others. Breckinridge won in all 11 southern slave states except Virginia, which Bell won narrowly, and the border states between North and South broke: just Missouri for Douglas, Kentucky and Tennessee for Bell, and Maryland for Breckinridge. Breckinridge did not exceed 10 percent in any of the northern states, and Lincoln and Douglas (despite Douglas’s mighty efforts to appease the South) had insignificant numbers of votes there. The country’s regional divisions, away from the border between North and South, could scarcely have been more stark.
2. CIVIL WAR AT LAST
South Carolina’s legislature voted to set up a state convention, which voted unanimously to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860, citing the election of a regional party, and of an anti-slavery president, and what it called the North’s prolonged war on slavery. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed between January 9 and February 1. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee voted that they would secede if any effort were made to coerce a seceding state to remain in the Union. There were 25 to 35 percent anti-secession minorities in Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, even after the legislatures had voted to secede, but opinion firmed up quickly across the South.
The great American Union was crumbling as the handover from Buchanan to Lincoln neared. In his message to the Congress on December 3, Buchanan reiterated his notorious empathy with the slave states and declared the impotence of the federal government to prevent secession by force, on the advice of the attorney general, Jeremiah S. Black. (Black was rewarded for his pusillanimity by being named secretary of state when Cass left the sinking ship on December 14, 1860. Black said secession was illegal, but that coercion was also—a legally and practically absurd position that disgusted retired General Cass.) The legal argumen
t about secession has always been fuzzy. Washington certainly charged the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention to produce an “indissoluble union,” and it was hoped that this had been done. But the right of distinct units of a country to secede is frequently asserted and recognized, such as, in the nineteenth century, Belgium from the Netherlands and Texas from Mexico (not altogether spontaneously, as has been recounted), and in the twentieth century, Norway from Sweden, Ireland from the United Kingdom, Singapore from Malaysia, all the Soviet republics from Russia, and the Slovaks from Czechoslovakia; but none of these federations had anything like the voluntary origins or formal, consensual legitimacy of the United States. It is very difficult to find any legal rationale for the American states simply purporting to secede as if they had an untrammeled right at all times to promote themselves from subordinate jurisdictions in a federal state to sovereignty, merely by vote of a convention struck by act of the state legislature.
Since the legality of secession is not clear, Lincoln wisely chose to strengthen his legal position, both for posterity and opposite foreign powers, by arranging for the insurgents to begin the violence with an act of coercive aggression against the federal government. Between December 28, 1860, and February 18, 1861, state militiamen seized federal forts and arsenals in South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, though without gunfire or casualties. When President Buchanan tried to send supplies to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on January 5, in an unarmed ship, it was driven off by gunfire from Confederate shore batteries, again without casualties.
The Confederate States of America provisionally established themselves on February 4, 1861, at Montgomery, Alabama, with a states’ rights affiliation of consenting states, and five days later, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was elected president and Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who had opposed secession (along with Douglas’s recent running mate, Herschel V. Johnson), vice president of the Confederacy. From February 11 to 23, Lincoln was on his famous train trip from Springfield, where he gave a memorable farewell, to Washington, with 14 stops along the way to greet well-wishers from the back of the train. In his inaugural address on March 4, he was conciliatory (“We must not be enemies”), but said that “No state, on its own mere action, can get out of the Union,” making it clear that he did not accept the secessions that had been proclaimed. He also made it clear that violence need not occur, and that if it did, it would be the fault of the insurgents. Lincoln advised South Carolina that provisions only were on their way by ship to Fort Sumter at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, and South Carolina opened up withering fire on the fort from shore batteries on April 11. It surrendered on April 13. The South had opened fire on the North and galvanized opinion to suppress the revolt. There had been a good deal of waffling about, in Horace Greeley’s words, not wanting “to live in a country where one part is pinned to the other by bayonets.” This line of reasoning largely vanished after Fort Sumter was attacked (albeit no one was killed).
Lincoln announced the existence of an insurrection and called for 75,000 volunteers. This was seen as the signal of an imminent invasion, and Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina joined the Confederacy between April 17 and May 20, taking most of their serving U.S. Army officers with them, including Colonel Robert E. Lee, who opposed secession but felt his higher loyalty was to Virginia than to the U.S.A. (On that day, he declined General Winfield Scott’s offer of command of the Union Army, and would assume command of the Army of Northern Virginia in June 1862, where he would become one of history’s great commanders.) The 50 western counties of Virginia seceded from Virginia and were recognized two years later as the state of West Virginia (fulfilling Hamilton’s old ambition to break up Virginia). The Union thus rejected the right of states to secede, but upheld the right of parts of states that opposed secession, when the majority in the state approved secession, to secede from the secessionist state and remain in the Union. Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were slave states that remained in the Union, though there were close contests for the loyalty of the last three.
Lincoln had taken his opponents for the Republican presidential nomination into key government position—Seward as secretary of state, Chase at Treasury, Bates as attorney general—and he made the Pennsylvania Republican leader, Simon Cameron, secretary of war. (This last appointment was not a success, and Lincoln shortly replaced him with the forceful and abrasive, but effective, Edwin Stanton.) The 74-year-old Winfield Scott, a military hero for nearly 50 years, since America’s first victories in the War of 1812, was still the commanding general of the U.S. Army. He cautioned against rushing into battle with raw recruits against southerners who would be more experienced with firearms, but congressional and press demands for a quick victory caused General Irwin McDowell to be sent forward at the head of 30,000 men to engage General Pierre G.T. Beauregard at Bull Run (Manassas), near Washington, on July 21, 1861. It started out well but ingenious improvisations by Confederate generals Joseph E. Johnston and Thomas J. Jackson, who earned the nickname “Stonewall” on that day, turned it into a victory for the South and a rout of the Union, with much of social Washington watching from a nearby height.
Lincoln traveled to West Point to get Scott’s view. The ample septuagenarian said it would be a long and difficult war but was certainly winnable. Greater distances would eat up part of the Union’s manpower advantage, and it would take some time to accustom Union draftees to the soldier’s life that would come more easily to most Confederates. He produced—as he had for Polk 15 years before with his Mexican War strategy of Kearny’s procession to California, Taylor’s frontier action, and his own amphibious landing at Veracruz and march on Mexico City—a clever plan that was eventually executed. He advocated what was called an “Anaconda Plan” of strangling the South: a naval blockade along all its coast; constant pressure on its capital of Richmond from the main army defending Washington; attacks up and down the Mississippi from New Orleans and St. Louis to cut off Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana; and then an offensive from Tennessee southeast through Georgia with the Armies of the Cumberland and the Tennessee, to cut the Confederacy in half again; and a northern pivot to roll up the Confederates between those armies and the Union Army of the Potomac between and around Washington and Richmond. Once again, he instantly identified the winning strategy, which succeeded as soon as Lincoln found the commanders who could carry it out. (Scott lived to see the Anaconda Plan completed, and died, full of honors, in 1866, aged almost 80, along with Washington and Nathanael Greene, one of America’s three greatest general prior to those about to make their names.) Lincoln’s first commanding general was George B. McClellan, a dashing officer who had won some early skirmishes in West Virginia.
As 1861 ended, the Union and the Confederacy were settling into what promised to be prolonged combat. Lincoln made it clear that he was conducting a war forced upon him, to preserve the Union, and that it was not a war to end slavery, though he would not tolerate the spread of slavery. Now he was armed with a plan of war; it remained to find the commanders and recruit and train the armies. The fact that many still regarded him as an ungainly bumpkin conferred the advantage of being underestimated.
Beyond the technical arguments about the indissolubility of the Union, and the general right to put down an insurrection, Lincoln invoked what amounted to a constitutional doctrine of eminent domain. Only the restoration of the Union would preserve the continuity of the great experiment of 1776, would continue to hold out the promise to the world of democratic government from the people upwards, and not devolved downward on men, whom he saw as essentially self-governing. If the South departed successfully, the United States would lose nearly 30 percent of its people and 40 percent of its territory, its momentum, mystique, national morale, and heritage of freedom; it would be hemmed about between British Canada and insolent rebels, as European countries are surrounded by rivals; and America’s destiny to lead the world toward the attainment o
f the rights of man would be forfeit, as the dead and brutal hand of slavery crumpled the proclaimed principles of the Declaration of Independence. Until Lincoln had the armed might to crush the South, he would be vulnerable to the rationalizations and lapses of purpose of his people. If he could develop the first without being swamped by the second, he would save the nation that, in less time than now separated America from Yorktown, would save democracy in the world. Part of Lincoln’s infallible eloquence was his unjingoistic conviction of America’s predestined greatness and vocation to lead the world. His vision was accurate, as long as his self-confidence, which survived his frequent lapses into moroseness, was justified. A great and terrible drama was well underway.
3. ANTIETAM AND RELATIONS WITH THE BRITISH AND THE FRENCH
Abraham Lincoln issued his War Order No. 1, on January 27, 1862 (nine months after hostilities began), for a general Union offensive. In a pattern that was to become tediously familiar, McClellan ignored it. In what was to become a more agreeable tradition, his order was carried out beyond the call of duty in the west, where Generals George H. Thomas and Ulysses S. Grant advanced in January and February into Tennessee and captured Fort Donelson, where Grant shocked the South by taking 14,000 prisoners, and took Nashville on February 25. A sign of things to come was furnished when real blood was drawn at Shiloh, almost at the border of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, on April 6–7, where Grant took 13,000 casualties out of 63,000 Union soldiers engaged, and inflicted 11,0000 casualties on the Confederacy, including their commander, General A.S. Johnston, who was killed on the battlefield.
On April 26, 1862, a Union naval force under future admiral David Farragut landed General Benjamin Butler’s forces, which took New Orleans. Only about 300 miles separated Grant from Butler, a narrowing window between the eastern and western Confederacy. The blockade of the Confederate coastline was already in force and being tightened, and the third of General Winfield Scott’s Anaconda strategy components, the cutting off of the western Confederacy by driving down the Mississippi after taking New Orleans, was already underway. The second element, keeping the pressure constantly on Richmond, was off to a slow start.
