Within six weeks of South Carolina’s secession, the legislatures of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana passed ordinances of secession. Then Texas joined the exodus despite Governor Sam Houston’s warning that the South was plunging into anarchy: “Here is a constitutional party that intends to violate the Constitution because a man is constitutionally elected President,” Houston protested. “If the people constitutionally elect a President, is the minority to resist him? Do they intend to carry that principle into their new Southern Confederacy? If they do, we can readily conceive how long it will last.” Of all the seceding states, Texas was the only one that submitted the secession ordinance to popular vote. But it passed handily.
Andrew Johnson of Tennessee also opposed secession. His confidence in the Union unshaken, he firmly believed “in man’s capability to govern himself. I will not give up this Government that is now called an experiment,” he said in the Senate. “No: I intend to stand by it, and I entreat every man throughout the nation who is a patriot [to] . . . rally around the altar of our common country, and lay the Constitution upon it as our last libation, and swear by our God, and all that is sacred and holy, that the Constitution shall be saved, and the Union preserved.”
“In the language of the departed Jackson,” he stoutly declared, “let us exclaim that the Union, ‘the Federal Union, it must be preserved.’ ”
Hailed to the skies as a reincarnation of Andrew Jackson, Johnson had crossed swords with a number of powerful Southern leaders over the Homestead Bill and now prudently threw in his lot with Unionists although he did believe what he was saying. Such are politics, a mixture of expedience and conviction. But this self-made son of a seamstress was the proslavery Unionist hero of a very short-lived hour; there was talk in the Tennessee legislature of removing him from the Senate, and in Memphis he was hung in effigy.
While Northerners dithered, according to Carl Schurz, the South grew stronger. “Action, action is the great secret of success, and if ever a time called for it, it is now,” Schurz declared. “I do not understand the men who, when the decision of one of the vital questions of the age is within their grasp, stand there chicken-hearted and cast about for small contemptible expedients.” These contemptible expedients were precisely the compromises that, as it happened, neither the North nor the South would accept; why they could not is another matter: pride to a degree—but mostly the reason was what the abolitionist Thomas Higginson rightly called “negrophobia.” Southern radicals drew on their standard shibboleths: that Lincoln’s election would inspire slave insurrections throughout the South; that Republicanism presaged a nation of black men and women with rights equal to those of the white population, social as well as legal; that Southern institutions would be denied the right to decide for themselves when and how to abolish slavery, if they should so desire. Fanatical, money-grubbing New Englanders would keep on leading them around by the nose.
Understandably, Southern secessionists also assumed that a political party committed to an antislavery platform would eventually want to abolish slavery everywhere. The very presence of such a platform, though it promised to protect slavery where it existed, was certainly implying that slavery was immoral. To maintain an immoral system was at best a contradiction, at worst an impossibility, and Southerners knew it. Their “peculiar institution” was lost—that is, in the “house divided” language of Lincoln, it was doomed to “ultimate extinction in all States, old as well as new, north as well as south.” Said one weary observer, “It is this perpetual putting of each side in a false light toward the other which has brought us where we are.”
So while men such as Seward edged toward a conciliatory Southern policy, more and more Southerners believed that the North, controlled by Republicans, could never truly compromise; they thus took no comfort in rhetoric about the protection of slavery where it was or about the vaunted inviolability of states’ rights. And the Southerners were right: the Republicans (led by Lincoln) would not compromise over the extension of slavery. These same Southerners often failed to admit they too would not give an inch.
And their gospel of secession was not a new creed, not by any means. At least in South Carolina, it sprang from the sense of entitlement encapsulated in John C. Calhoun’s nullification doctrine, espoused years earlier. Calhoun had asserted that a state had possessed the right to veto, or nullify, any federal law it found unconstitutional, which was what the South Carolina legislature had done in 1832 when it had deemed a federal tariff null and void. And the legislature had gone even further, saying that the federal government’s failure to honor the state’s action was grounds for secession. President Andrew Jackson had disagreed, claiming that under the Articles of Confederation, the nation had existed before the Constitution was ratified and that, in any case, the Constitution established a national government, not a series of independent, strutting states that could ignore the federal laws they had all made.
When South Carolina had lost that battle twenty-eight years before—no other state had supported its nullification lobby—it had nonetheless believed it had won the war. Secession came to be seen in South Carolina and then in the Deep South in general as a state’s sovereign right. Alfred Iverson of Georgia put it this way: secession is “the right of revolution.” He, among others, now reasoned that the 1860 presidential election elevated minority over majority rule. Secession was therefore a War of Independence against a brutal despot, the North. “I can’t stand the idea of being domineered over by a set of Hypocritical scoundrels such as Sumner, Seward, Wilson, Hale, etc. etc.,” he announced.
Though argued as a democratic right, secession was a slap to democratic government and of course to Stephen Douglas and the Douglas Democrats, for whom popular sovereignty was the consequence of democracy. Yet most secessionists saw themselves as protecting the Constitution, not tearing it apart; secession was their duty. “We are upholding the true doctrines of the Federal Constitution,” cried Jefferson Davis. “We are conservative.” For them the Constitution was a proslavery document and as such deserved protection. In fact, secessionists considered William Lloyd Garrison an unsuspecting ally, for when he called the Constitution a pact with the devil, he was saying what Southerners, especially Southern radicals, insisted all along: the Constitution protected slavery. Snorted the clever Robert Toombs, Garrison was far more honest than that duplicitous, two-faced Black Republican, Abraham Lincoln.
But now, as it had been during the nullification crisis of 1832, the underlying issue was the North’s increasing power. And that power endangered slavery. Secessionists worried that if slavery did not expand into the territories, the black population would stay where it was, bottled up and likely to explode. Fear motivated them. That is to say, racial anxiety was as pervasive as economic anxiety when it came to secession, though it was hard to separate the two, for they were threaded together with the rope that bound secessionists and many Southerners to their land, their way of life, their mint juleps, and their pride of race.
Lincoln’s election was thus not so much the cause of secession as its excuse: institutional restraints (read: the federal government) had insulted Southerners, imperiled their way of life, undermined their moral structure, triggered their racial fears, and held them in thrall to Northern financiers who had forced planters to buy goods in a protected market. Even Hinton Helper, the voice of the yeoman, wanted the Southerner, especially the non-slaveholder, to walk tall or walk out. How could one resist? “On the 4th of March 1861, we are either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it,” said a heated Georgian. “It’s a revolution!” Judah Benjamin cried—a “prairie fire,” unstoppable, unquenchable.
As if in reply, a disconsolate Alexander Stephens observed, “Revolutions are much easier started than controlled.”
HAVING BEEN FOR years surrounded by Southern advisers such as Davis and Toombs, and with Southerners dominating his cabinet, Buchanan had supported secession by not opposing it. So when in late 1860 the Southern states
began to seize federal property such as courthouses, post offices, customhouses, and forts, the dilatory Buchanan would be forced to take some action. Yet he did not reinforce Forts Moultrie and Sumter, near the coast of South Carolina, with munitions and food, as General Winfield Scott had asked him to do. Lewis Cass, Buchanan’s secretary of state, resigned in protest. To Cass the issue was plain: the government must defend federal property. Of course that was not so simple. Buchanan believed that reinforcing the forts implied military intervention, and if he intervened militarily, he would be stoking the secessionist fires.
In the meantime he was discredited by the discovery of corruption in his administration and, in particular, in the office of his secretary of war, John B. Floyd, a former governor of Virginia. A double-dealer who was either lazy or venal—no one ever knew which—but who definitely hated those Black Republicans, Floyd had been sending long-range artillery and thirty-two pounders (large cannon) to the South. In fact, Floyd had ordered Major Robert Anderson, a Kentucky-born Virginian, to Fort Moultrie, likely expecting that Anderson would do his bidding, which was to say do nothing—or, as Floyd put it, “to yield to necessity”—if Southerners tried to seize the fort.
Anderson was nervously awaiting reinforcements that never came.
The day after Christmas 1860, Major Anderson ordered his men to put on their knapsacks and paddle across the water from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter, the sturdier stronghold, where he could better protect his troops and defend the Stars and Stripes, if it should come to that. To Anderson, there was no choice; this move had to be made if he were to do his duty as he saw fit. South Carolinians were furious. Assuming that Buchanan had secretly told them, or at least had implied, that he wouldn’t reinforce the forts or interfere with Charleston Harbor, Governor Pickens of South Carolina insisted that Anderson return to the weaker Fort Moultrie. Indeed, Buchanan too wanted to order Anderson to go back to Moultrie. Of course, that would leave Anderson and his men vulnerable to attack; in fact, it was a death warrant.
Fortunately for Major Anderson, though, several tough-minded Democrats had joined Buchanan’s cabinet. Replacing Lewis Cass as secretary of state was a clear-eyed jurist, Attorney General Jeremiah Black. Replacing John Floyd as secretary of war was the cantankerous but brilliant Edwin M. Stanton. And John Adams Dix had replaced Howell Cobb as secretary of the Treasury. Both Black and Stanton were Unionists who knew that ordering Anderson back to Moultrie—acceding to South Carolina’s demands—was tantamount to treason, if not out and out murder. And Dix declared that if anyone tore down a U.S. flag, that traitor was to be shot on the spot.
Buchanan changed course. The federal government would defend national property against possible attack and not remove its troops from the harbor.
As expected, Southerners exploded in rage. When the unarmed federal merchant ship Star of the West, loaded with provisions, tried to reinforce Fort Sumter, Robert Toombs said he’d like to blow it out of the water. The Yankees were invading. South Carolinian guns opened fire on the Star, which, to keep the peace, steamed quietly out of Charleston Harbor—and in so doing proved to angry Southerners what they believed all along: under the pressure of iron, the North would turn tail.
THOUGH PRESIDENT-ELECT LINCOLN was not cut from the same cotton cloth as Buchanan, it’s difficult to know what he was thinking or planning to do as he bided his time before March, when he would be inaugurated. An astute observer who met him during that troubled winter later noted that he seemed “crafty and sensible,” which is to say he would not show his hand.
Little word had come out of Springfield, where Lincoln waited, other than the occasional announcement of names he was considering for his cabinet. Chief among them was that of William Seward, the beak-nosed, stoop-shouldered, resilient politician whose dream of occupying the White House had been thwarted by a prairie statesman. Lincoln shrewdly selected Seward to be his secretary of state.
Though devastated when he’d lost the Republican nomination, Seward was an optimistic man and a professional who had campaigned hard for the 1860 Republican ticket. (Hannibal Hamlin of Maine had been Lincoln’s running mate.) And during what seemed the interminable four months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, Seward, with supreme self-confidence, took on the mantle of chief of state, or so thought young Henry Adams, who was serving as his father’s private secretary. Gimlet-eyed, Adams carefully observed Seward and accorded him the respect later commentators denied him, for to Adams, Seward was the great conciliator whose forbearance, caution, and moderation may have saved the day, if it could be saved at all—and without the loss of a single life. There was “no shake” in Seward, said Adams; “he talks square up to the mark and beyond it.”
With the crisis deepening and secessionist desperadoes (Carl Schurz’s term) trying to seduce Maryland and Virginia to join them, Seward, along with Charles Francis Adams, Henry’s father, drew up another conciliatory plan: New Mexico could enter the Union, effectively as a slave state (albeit with very few slaves), which everyone had assumed it would be anyway (under the terms of the Compromise of 1850). Northerners would go along because they knew that slavery couldn’t thrive there anyway, they reasoned, and Southerners would get a slave state without troubling the North overmuch. It was a plan, certainly, but one that again voided the Republican platform. And it demonstrated how compromise had come to mean surrender to the Southerners who were now overtly secessionist. Yet to Adams and Seward, the South’s rejection of the proposal demonstrated that it was fire-eaters, not Republicans, who refused to negotiate. For what Seward and Adams wanted above all was to mollify the border states and the states of the upper South, neither of which had committed itself to one side or another. And Seward wanted to believe that the seceding states would come back to the Union, if coddled enough.
On Saturday, January 12—by then Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama had seceded—Seward dusted off the notion of compromise—this, in spite of Lincoln’s avowed insistence on hewing close to the Republican platform, which is to say not extending slavery into the territories. But Lincoln had been silent so far. Perhaps he would fold after all or, as naysayers alleged, did not yet know what he wanted to do. In any case, in a speech before the Senate, Seward painstakingly outlined the dire effects of disunion on commerce, diplomatic relations, prestige, and peace. Insisting that the tried-and-true method of saving the Union—congressional compromise—would likely not work this time, Seward then reiterated that the Republicans (and he) wished only to defend the Constitution, not to threaten or abolish slavery where it already existed. Staying silent on higher laws, he hinted that he would happily repeal those personal liberty laws that circumvented the Fugitive Slave Act; and he readily admitted that he would uphold any law that prevented one state’s invasion of another and thus indirectly addressed the fear sparked by John Brown’s raid in Harpers Ferry.
Though he was aiming his proposals primarily at the border states and the Unionists of the upper South, to antislavery men, Seward’s suggestions smacked of appeasement, as did, worse yet, his suggestion that when the situation calmed the country consider a constitutional amendment to forbid congressional interference with slavery forever. Perhaps as a sop to the South, he wanted to assure it that Republicans intended to protect slavery where it already existed. This had been Buchanan’s idea as well as that of the New York political wire puller Thurlow Weed, who had over the years worked closely with Seward.
Seward concluded his speech with the benign benediction of a pie-eyed dreamer captivated by his own pie-eyed dream of a reconstructed America. “Soon, it will be seen that violence and sedition are only local and temporary,” he said. “I feel sure that the hour has not come for this great nation to fall.”
Tears welled up in the eyes of John Crittenden, but John Hale of New Hampshire fidgeted in his seat. Partially recovered from his beating by Preston Brooks, Charles Sumner glumly stroked his handsome head. Old Ben Wade twirled his large thumbs. Not long afterward, a Republican
senator cried out, “God damn you, Seward, you’ve betrayed your principles and your party.”
The abolitionist poet Whittier wondered if Seward was nothing more than an appeaser dressed in the dubious clothes of a compromiser. “If he yields the ground upon which the election was carried and consents to the further extension of slavery,” Whittier remarked, “he will ‘compromise’ me as well as the country and himself.” Similarly, Frederick Douglass thought Seward the typical enemy of slavery, willing to purchase peace at any price. Maybe so. Seward’s wife, Frances, told him that he was sounding lamentably like the disgraced Daniel Webster. “Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings,” she said, “cannot be right.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow thought so too. “With the human soul,” he said, “there is no compromise.”
THE COUNTRY WAS brutally, madly, perplexingly split.
Men in military uniform marched through Southern streets, and, as if they were headed for an unnamed battlefield, they lugged knapsacks and carried bayonets. Almost five hundred such men descended on Charleston. Near the military academy, the Citadel, artillery was being stockpiled, ready to be used immediately or transported where it was needed. In California, the Sacramento Daily Union lambasted Washington: “The Government, great overgrown giant as it is, must stand and let South Carolina cut off one arm, Alabama another, Mississippi slash away a leg, while Florida and Texas each gouge out an eye, and still the powerful giant must patiently endure the mutilation of his body.”
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