Yet some in the cotton states thought that the North would peaceably acquiesce to secession after all. “Republicans are as much afraid of us as we are of them, and they are more impressed with the idea of our resources and our strength. And my opinion now is that if you can avoid a collision, assume towards old Lincoln an attitude of respectful determination,” said a former Georgian congressman to Howell Cobb, “that we can so manage him as to get along till Congress meets, when they repeal all federal laws as far as they affect the seceding States.”
Maybe the day could be saved; hope springs eternal. In February, the Virginia legislature sponsored a peace conference in Washington attended, as one might have guessed, by none of the cotton states. It dragged on for three weeks, went nowhere, accomplished nothing. And on the same day that the peace conference convened, the seceded cotton states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to organize their new nation, form a provisional government, and write a constitution. The delegates were efficient, dedicated, and inspired white supremacists, and when a band played “Dixie,” Varina Davis, the wife of the Confederacy’s provisional president, Jefferson Davis, dubbed the song the anthem of an independent South.
As William L. Yancey put it, “The hour and the man have met.”
Tall and spare, colorless and rigid, his skin pulled tautly over his face, Jefferson Davis promised the South, “No compromise, no reconstruction, can now be entertained.” And there was none. The provisional constitution, largely a copy of the U.S. Constitution, enacted such reforms as limiting the president to one six-year term. It also pledged itself to state sovereignty and guaranteed slavery in all new territories. And the Confederate Constitution did not spurn the word “slave” or “Negro,” which it repeated over and over.
Accompanied by the provisional vice president, none other than the small-boned and unhappy Alexander Stephens, chosen in part as a counterweight, Davis rode forth with kingly pomp on inauguration day, Monday, February 18. Sitting in a barouche lined in yellow and white satin, decorated with silver, and pulled by six fine horses, Davis and the pasty Stephens were met with roars of approval from the crowd in front of the Alabama capitol. A brass band was playing, and militia companies decked out in blue trousers and red coats stood nearby. Besieged with flowers, Davis, wearing a plain gray suit, explained from the portico that the new Confederate nation “illustrates the American idea that governments rest upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them at will whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established.”
As for slavery, it was the reluctant secessionist Alexander Stephens who emphatically made the case. The “corner-stone” of the Confederate States, he said, “rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.]” Speaking impromptu in Savannah, Georgia, a few weeks after the inauguration, he enthusiastically called the new Confederate government “the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” And, as he added, its constitution “has put at rest forever, all agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.
“This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this as the ‘rock upon which the old Union would split.’ He was right. . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by him and by most of the leading statesmen of the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature: that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.”
To Stephens, however, those founding ideas were utterly wrong. “They rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races,” he continued. “This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a government built upon it; when the ‘storm came and the wind blew, it fell.’ ”
Stephens was reiterating the standard Southern rationale for slavery, as he’d done when he’d retired from Congress two years earlier: the Bible sanctioned slavery. “There is a hierarchy among human beings which is based on natural differences,” he insisted, “and these differences have been ordained by God.”
But Stephens had skipped a step in his argument. Even if you granted him his poor premise—the superiority of one race over another—you still could not justify the owning of human beings. For, unlike Lincoln, with whom he had recently corresponded, Stephens did not bother to distinguish between slavery and race. To Stephens, they had become the same thing.
Lincoln had replied to Stephens, whom he otherwise admired, as directly as he’d answered Douglas. “You think slavery is right, and ought to be extended,” Lincoln wrote in private, “while we think it is wrong, and ought to be abolished. That, I suppose, is the rub.”
Whatever the rub, voters in North Carolina and Tennessee chose not to assemble secession conventions, and in Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri, the voters sent Unionists to their respective conventions. By April, those states decided not to secede. And then they had to deal with Lincoln.
LINCOLN WAS NOT a sanctimonious Boston Brahmin protecting his factories or looking to turn the other cheek; nor was he a dispirited doughface like Buchanan, paralyzed by the situation he had inadvertently helped to create. Nor was he Stephen Douglas, who was fighting hard to save a Union in which he fervently believed—and to destroy the Buchanan minions who had destroyed him. No, Lincoln, with his fine-tuned political instincts, came from a part of the country where standing up to bullies was de rigueur. He also managed to temper anger with eloquence, outrage with magnanimity, and politics with principle. And he’d been legitimately elected.
“We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people,” Lincoln said. “Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government.”
If since November Lincoln seemed to fiddle while fire-eaters burned the Union, slaveholding state after slaveholding state leaving it, the president-elect had actually not been idle, for he would soon appoint a cabinet that included not only William Seward but also other Republicans, strange bedfellows who, like Seward, had sought the presidency: Edward Bates of Missouri for attorney general; the ex–Free Soiler Salmon P. Chase for Treasury, and Pennsylvania’s allegedly crooked Simon Cameron, a controversial choice, to head the War Department. He also tapped Gideon Welles of Connecticut as secretary of the navy, Caleb B. Smith for Interior, and, as postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, the scion of the well-connected and somewhat unpopular political family from the border state of Maryland. Charles Francis Adams called the group a “motley mixture, consisting of one statesman, one politician, two jobbers, one intriguer, and two respectable old gentlemen.”
Lincoln had also been composing with great care an inaugural address that he ran by a number of men, such as Stephen Douglas, Carl Schurz, and the more pacific and bombastic Seward, plus his adviser and confidant from Illinois, Orville Browning. For Lincoln was confronting a dismal situation. During his twelve-day trip from Springfield to Washington, he had been assailed by reports of assassination attempts and, as Whitman put it, men with knives and pistols in hip or breast pocket, ready to fight when the riot started.
Though Seward suggested Lincoln revise the inaugural speech here and there, the result was utterly Lincoln’s own: precise, exact, impassioned, and steeled with tough-minded phrases that clearly addressed the salient issues. His command of the crisis brooked no dillydallying, no hesitation, no e
quivocation. So he began mildly, reiterating that he had “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 supported the Fugitive Slave Act and all laws, as he said, “which stand unrepealed.”
After offering these assurances, Lincoln cleaved to the Constitution—and, by so doing, implicitly discarded any suggestion that he adhered to any other higher law. Rather, his legal task was to support what he called “the fundamental law of all national governments,” which was their perpetuity. “No government proper,” he said with bite, “ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.” The Union’s Constitution, in other words, did not provide an instrument of its own destruction, no matter what secessionists wanted to believe.
He also pointed out that the Union predated the Constitution; that, in fact, the Constitution had been established “to form a more perfect union.” The destruction of one part of the Constitution rendered the Union less perfect. “It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union.” Make no mistake, he seemed to be saying, I am here to enforce the law and to safeguard the Union.
Further, Lincoln argued later in the speech in a less legalistic but no less ingenious way that the “central idea of secession,” as he put it, is anarchy. “If a minority . . . will secede rather than acquiesce [in majority rule], they make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy, a year or two hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it.” The self-devouring logic of secession, as he had said before, contains its own destruction.
To maintain the Union, however, there need be no bloodshed—unless, he added, “it be forced upon the national authority.” He was talking about the forts, particularly Moultrie and Sumter. Promising no invasion of the South—“the government will not assail you”—he said that the mails would continue. As to matters more grave than the delivery of letters, Lincoln reiterated what he’d said to Alexander Stephens. “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.” This was the heart of the matter, this had caused a separation that outran geography—and this separation was unlike that of a husband and wife who divorce and move far away. The homespun analogy made the point.
He also suggested considering lawful constitutional amendments—that is, via “the modes prescribed in the instrument itself.” In the meantime, he asked for calm, time, deliberation, and reflection.
He delivered the speech on March 4, 1861. The windy, chilly, overcast morning visibly brightened at noontime when over twenty-five thousand, perhaps thirty thousand, men and women thronged the Capitol. But the event was as martial as it was celebratory. “It seemed more like escorting a prisoner to his doom than a President to his inauguration,” said an onlooker.
Uniformed cavalry and armed regiments roamed the streets. Sharpshooters took aim from the tops of buildings in case of trouble. “I never expected to experience such a sense of mortification and shame in my own country as I felt to-day,” said another spectator, “in entering the Capitol through hedges of marines armed to the teeth.”
Lincoln seemed nervous. Recently, he’d grown a beard. Whiskers seemed dignified, or at least they helped cover his long neck. He wore a new cashmere suit, but the silk stovepipe hat—by now his signature—made him appear even taller and bonier. He clutched a gold-tipped ebony cane. And he sat uncomfortably in the four-horse carriage along with the tired, discredited James Buchanan. This was part of the ritual parade. What was different, though, was the huge float drawn by six white horses and decorated with a large gilt eagle. On top of it rode thirty-four young women representing each of the states.
When Lincoln unwound his long legs and stood up to speak, he could not find room for his silk hat on the rickety table in front of him. Stephen Douglas leaned forward and, with a smile, grabbed the hat, which he held in his lap all through Lincoln’s speech, almost as if he were anticipating Lincoln’s closing remark, “We are not enemies, but friends.”
“We must not be enemies,” Lincoln concluded. “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. 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, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Shared pasts cannot be forgotten. A family united by blood and kinship should not be torn asunder.
ON THE DAY that Lincoln delivered his inaugural address, the gun manufacturer Samuel Colt sent Howell Cobb’s wife a gift in a box shaped to look like a book. On the back of the box was an inscription: “Colt on the Constitution, Higher Law and Irrepressible Conflict, dedicated by the Author to Mrs. Howell Cobb.”
Inside the box was a pistol case; inside that, a finely engraved, ivory-handled revolver.
The din in the country was such that no one could listen to Lincoln without hearing what they already believed. The Charleston Mercury said that Lincoln did not “grasp the circumstances of the momentous emergency,” and Frederick Douglass said the inaugural was a “double-tongued document, capable of two constructions.” Parsed by politicians and partisans alike, North and South, Republican and Democrat, Unionist and secessionist and everyone in between, the speech seemed to have something for everyone; it was a bit of a cipher, as was Lincoln.
The speech does show, though, that Lincoln knew what he was facing. His so-called indecisiveness or reticence during the previous months had been a strategic exercise in the noncommittal. “I claim not to have controlled events,” he shrewdly noted three years later, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Lincoln possessed the master politician’s knack for manipulating events while pretending to be mastered by them.
Though Lincoln could not have anticipated with any certainty the future course of these events, he did want to control them, yet he was also ready for the worst, should it come, and even should he help it come.
From his perch in New York, then, perhaps George Templeton Strong came closest to assessing the inaugural address, and Lincoln, correctly: “I think there’s a clank of metal in it.”
PART TWO
{ 1861–1865 }
(9)
ON TO RICHMOND
War came. Yet somehow those two words, accurate though they are, make the war seem inevitable: what came, had to have come. Perhaps, but perhaps not; for even with hindsight, it’s hard to say that this or that would or could have stopped the war.
In the years prior to 1861, however, a certain sense of inevitability dominated the newspapers, diaries, letters, and broadsides; war seemed a foregone conclusion, almost a promise. Clearly, there were those who wanted it. And clearly there were those who failed to imagine it. And since the threatened showdown between South and North had not materialized, not after years of acrimony, why not continue acrimonious, each side boosting the volume, each side letting off steam even if that meant standing by while speakers were mobbed or lynched and if now and then some troublesome, know-it-all senator was caned? Where was the incentive to budge, to question one’s own righteousness, to create the grounds on which a compromise might occur, if indeed it should? “We learned once for all that compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof,” reflected James Russell Lowell, “that it is a temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.” Compromise had become an anathema to people straddling one fence or another, whether Unionist or antislavery or just plain sick and tired of a problem that did not seem to go away and that admitted of no easy solution.
If conservat
ive Republicans such as Lowell were willing to abandon compromise or the language of compromise and yet dismiss secessionists as mad, they were not heeding the rumble of hatred, fueled by anxiety, that lay beneath years of bluster. “Events are crowding in upon us in thick succession,” warned Senator John Hale. “It does not become any of us, with rash and presumptuous courage or temerity, to shut our eyes to what is before us.” What was before the country was desperation, fear, and fury; secessionists suspected their way of life was doomed: doomed economically, because their great prosperity depended not just on slavery but on an agrarian economy that needed expansion, particularly into the Caribbean; doomed by their devotion to a single crop; doomed morally. Despite the enduring racism in the North, in the South, slavery was a “moral anachronism,” noted the historian Kenneth Stampp, who argued that the Confederacy unconsciously willed its own collapse. Defeat would rid the South of a moral burden too heavy, too out of step, too repulsive to shoulder any longer.
That did not cause secession or explain it. President Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans spelled the beginning of the end of slavery, and the South knew it. Without expansion, the slaveholding states would be hemmed in by the free states. Over time, they would lose the political numbers in Washington needed to block any constitutional amendment forbidding slavery. Such an amendment would in all likelihood appear sooner rather than later. And since slavery had been the prized cornerstone (to use Alexander Stephens’s word) of Southern society and economics, as Stephens had made amply clear, the South would fight to the death, if need be, to protect it.
Both sides underrated their opponents, each side misread the other—and themselves—and both sides failed to imagine that mutual mistrust could bring on massive slaughter. That failure of imagination was not inevitable by any means. And its consequences were terrible. “War begins where reason ends,” Frederick Douglass later said.
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